My son lives in Manassas, Virginia. If you don’t know its place in history, it was where the Battle of Bull Run was fought between the North and the South. It was the first battle of the Civil War. The South won that battle and if they hadn’t have been partying it up afterwards, they could have easily marched right onto Washington D.C. and it would have been game over. If they had crossed the river that day, we would all be having a hankering for Moon Pies, moonshine and pecan pie.
I liken my own time in Florida to the War Between the States. I know that technically Florida wasn’t considered the South during the war, for what reasons I still don’t quite understand. Unfortunately, we don’t study that kind of stuff here in Washington State. I can tell you all about the Pig War and why Ebey’s Slough is named after Colonel Isaac Neff Ebey, who was beheaded by the Kake Indians from Canada, but why Florida fought on the side of the North? I have no freakin’ idea.
As someone from the Northwest, I was always a bit of an outsider. I would say I was from Washington and everyone assumed it was D.C. Hey everyone on the East Coast, there is another Washington! And we have dirt cheap power, tons of apples and wine and if you ever loved good coffee, grunge and buying books online, thank us! Just don’t blame us for the Blue Screen of Death on your computer. You should have bought a Mac.
But I digress. So, there I am, apparently the only one from the Great White North(west) to have ever settled in Florida. And why am I there? Because of a Southerner. Sure, you didn’t fight on that side in the Civil War, but you’re still the South. Look at a map, it’s quite evident.
And while many Floridians just consider themselves Americans, I lived with someone who was proud to be a Florida Cracker. Now, I didn’t know what that actually was for a long time. I just assumed it was tied to the pride of being a hillbilly. After all, her folks lived on a small farm with geese, a pig at one time, various other rodents and exotic animals – as I said before, the Ziffels were my neighbors. What else was I supposed to assume?
I had never heard the term Cracker, expect those of the Ritz and Wheat Thins variety. For those in the Northern climes, a Florida Cracker was originally a colonial era person who settled in Florida before there were condos and snowbirds. People descended from them consider it a source of pride to be a Cracker.
The ex was only half descended from the original settlers. Her dad was from Belize. So we could just say she was Half Cracked. I’m good with that.
Anyway, back to our story. I had high hopes that by living in the South I would get to enjoy Southern hospitality. There’s not much of that there, largely because everyone is from someplace else. This is not a dig on Florida. I came from somewhere else too.
No, I’m referring to life with the ex. I thought she would be a bit more Southern, but it turned out that she was more New Yorker, even though she had never lived there. Strange she lives there now. I guess she finally realized that she wasn’t much of a Cracker at all and that her demeanor was much more suited to New York City than the more congenial Southern girl, which as we know, I fall for like a tree in a forest.
Sadly, our relationship was the War Between the States all over again. Who played which side should be obvious. I was reluctant to be drawn into the War, but the Southerner was bent on making slavery legal again, those surrounding her including me, being placed in the slave trade.
None of us liked it. We longed to be free from the shackles of make-work that the ex loved to get us involved with. Sew this skirt, make this table, haul this bale… OK, we were really hauling boxes of jewelry for her “business,” but she seemed to really like to play the role of the plantation owner and we were her chattle.
Small wonder why war broke out. It had always been an uneasy peace. The Southerner would make a land grab, seizing more and more territory in our tentative relationship. The Northerner would try to take the high ground, trying to move the lines back to a neutral point, only to find himself in retreat as forces that thought they were superior would try to overwhelm him. So the Northerner resorted to guerilla tactics, sending his raiding parties in to do surgical strikes, wounding the Southerner in a war of words, an area she was ill equipped to do battle in. And so it would go on. For years the battle raged on, the Northerner outflanked, the Southerner caught off guard by an unorthodox maneuver she had never conceived possible.
Eventually, an uneasy truce was formed. We signed the papers at the courthouse (Viera, not Appomattox). We drew a new Mason-Dixon line down the middle of our home, the South on the West side, the North on the East. Looking back, I should have been in the West all along.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t free all the slaves. I guess I’m no Lincoln. Some of them remained enslaved and I suppose some of them still may be, thinking that the slave owner is just a good friend.
But me, I am free of that shackle around my finger. Now that I think about it, my ring really did look like a shackle. I guess I should feel fortunate though. She wanted to ring my neck but she only got the finger. You guess which one.
In the Emerald City, circling the wagons and bringing in reinforcements,
– Robb