My Floridiana

In the 1960s, a young Jewish anthropology professor moved from the urbane reaches of Chicago to Florida when her husband, also an academic, took a job at Florida State University. Her name was Gloria Jahoda and to some she is known as an anthropologist while to others as a writer of fiction but to Floridians she's best known as a historian and a writer of the true stories of parts of Florida which held little interest to other historians, writers, and journalists of her time. Jahoda, you see, is the author of two seminal books in the historiography of Florida history: The Other Florida and River of the Golden Ibis. Both of Dr. Jahoda's books have remained in print, despite having been written and first published decades ago-certainly some powerful proof of the lasting power of her prose and her concern for her adopted state.

Gloria Jahoda didn't set out to write about Florida: having moved to a new place and without a job of her own after years of being engaged in teaching college-level courses, she was by her own admission simply bored. So she set out in a rattle-trap car and blazed the back roads of north-central Florida, stopping to interview turpentine men, sharecroppers, rural preachers, fishermen and others in remote reaches of the state who were about as far in location and lifestyle from the beaches of Miami and the typical impression the rest of the nation had of Florida as they could have been. Hence the title of her first book, The Other Florida. Since then, this term has in circles of historians and other social scientists concerned with Florida come to mean, aside from the book itself, the way of looking at history which Jahoda brought to us: That it can be just as important to see what a turpentine worker has to say about his occupation and his Saturday nights in the juke joints as it is to write down when the Spanish first came to Florida or who the mayor of Tampa was in a certain year.

Jahoda appreciated people no matter their walks of life, she noticed vernacular architecture and jotted down detailed descriptions of it and she had a deep love for the wild lands of north-central Florida: she wanted to see all she could of places like Tate's Hell and rural Hamilton, Columbia, and Baker counties. She stitched together a quilt of Florida from tales told by old folks at home and scraps of paper in the musty libraries of FSU and UF, and she did it all with amazing, deep, and nearly poetic prose.

I am no Dr. Jahoda: I lack her wit, her eyes, her odd advantage at times as an outsider, and her astute education in anthropology. But I appreciate our state much in her model and I aim to share rare and neglected aspects of Florida with others and most of all, with fellow Floridians. When we open up the newspaper or turn on the television and see the news, we so often get caught up in the drama of what has been said that day in politics or what bank was robbed or what topic some school board is fighting over or how things are going with the war in Afghanistan. All this is important, but what of the very place we live? How many people the world over would give up or sell all they have to enjoy the freedom the United States offer combined with the natural wonders, climate, and diversity of Florida? We don't have to wonder, because we have it all right here.

(The above first written by Mike Walker in 2008 and published in his column in the North Florida News Daily.)