Al Burt’s Tropic of Cracker
is a state of mind shared by those who love "what remains of the
Florida that needed no blueprint or balance sheet for its creation, that
was here before there was a can opener or a commercial or a real-estate
agent." In his years of roving the state as a Miami Herald columnist, Al Burt mapped Florida’s Tropic of Cracker, not with lines of latitude and longitude but with stories.The
Crackers Burt tells of are men and women from Apalachicola to the
Everglades, from Tallahassee to the Keys. They lived in the late 1800s,
and they live today—along the Ocklawaha and in the floodplains of Lake
Okeechobee. They were cow hunters, Conchs, and alligator men. They grew
oranges, sugarcane, and muscadine grapes. They made moonshine. They
drove mules, ate fried mullet, and told yarns in a Cracker creole about
Florida’s panthers, snakes, alligators, and hurricanes. There are
luminaries among them—Zora Neale Hurston, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings,
Virgil Hawkins, John DeGrove, Harry Crews—but mostly they are just
regular folk who mark the borders of the elusive and magical Tropic of
Cracker.For anyone who loves the old Florida, Tropic of Cracker is the state’s truest road map and Al Burt its most eloquent cartographer.A volume in the Florida History and Culture series, edited by Raymond Arsenault and Gary R. Mormino
