What are Crackers?

One of the podcasts I listen to is The Splendid Table with Lynne Rossetto Kasper on NPR. Every episode features Jane & Michael Stern, who have the Web site Roadfood. Each week Jane & Michael talk about a restaurant in a different part of the country.

In the July 12th episode, Jane & Michael talked about the restaurant Saltwater Cowboy's in St. Augustine. While discussing the meaning of the term "saltwater cowboy", they also started going off on "cracker" and wondering what the origination of "cracker" was. I laughed out loud as Lynne cut them off so she could go on with the show. But I knew the origin of the word, passed down through my family lore.

Just to confirm my understanding before sharing it with you, I turned to Wikipedia, and the definition there is different than what I learned as a child growing up in Florida.

I always knew that my Daddy was a Florida Cracker. That meant he was born and bred in Florida. His daddy was born in Florida. I believe one of Daddy's grandmothers was a Seminole Indian. Daddy was born in Wauchula, which is out in the sticks, east of Sarasota. I've mentioned in earlier posts that his daddy earned fifty cents a week building orange crates for one of the orange packing cooperatives. They were proud of being native Floridians, no matter how dirt poor they were. They were not white trash. They were self-educated, hard working, honorable people.

When describing the origin of the word "cracker", Mother told me that a hundred years ago, when the Florida cowboys would be coming in for dinner from the fields, they would crack their whips to let the women know to put dinner on the table. The women would say to each other, "Here come the crackers."

The families like my Daddy's were not of an economic stratum to have owned slaves. When I was a child, we employed a black maid five days a week. We didn't consider Emma to be African-American. The word didn't exist. She didn't come from Africa. She came from Eatonville, two miles away across the railroad tracks. She was a sweet woman who helped mother with the laundry and the cleaning. She was paid an honest wage. My mother called her Emma and she called my mother Mrs. Crews. She had a granddaughter a year or so younger than me, and mother passed down my clothing for her use. Emma and my mother have kept track of each other through the years and as recently as two years ago Mother received a Christmas card from her.

I mention all this because, to me, the term "Florida Cracker" always carried an air of pride. Then in 1971 I went to Ecole d'Art Americaines in Fontainebleau, France. I met a young African-American singer from Orlando. He had grown up on the other side of town from me and his world view couldn't have been more different from mine. To him, Cracker was to whites as the "N" word was to blacks. I was shocked. I wanted to jump up in defense of native Floridians. To this day I have a hard time understanding how something so innocent could be so misunderstood and taken so harshly.

Maybe I'm naive. Maybe my "kindness spoken here" philosophy won't cure the ills of the world. But I prefer my definition, from a quiet, backwoods era where the women cooked over woodstoves and waited for their men to ride in on horseback and sit down with the family to dinner.