From the Sunday “Lifestyle” page:
Author and Marianna native Janis Owens stirs up memories
Author Janis Owens calls herself the cheapest Cracker on earth.
And that’s saying a lot,” she adds.
Born in Marianna in 1960 and raised the last child and only daughter of a biscuit-cooking mama and an Assembly of God preacher-turnedinsurance “policy man,” Owens noted in her blog that the scriptural admonition “the last shall be first” never seemed to apply in the church homecoming food line.
“As Pentecostals, we were denied much fleshly pleasure,” she said. “What we missed in terms of lasciviousness, we made up for in fried chicken.”
Owens is best known for her series of novels, “My Brother Michael,” “Myra Sims” and “The Schooling of Claybird Cats,” intertwined stories of family tragedy and redemption set in a North-Florida town. Her latest book, “The Cracker Kitchen,” will be published in February 2009 (it’s available for pre-order online) and focuses on a delightful collection of old family recipes and the sorts of stories Southerners tell around the table for Sunday dinners or out on the porch swing afterwards.
“It’s a memoir cookbook,” she said. “It’s taking a walk down a nostalgic road with me.”
Owens currently lives in Marion County on enough property that she can take her dogs for a morning stroll while still in her nightgown. (Although, after the temperature dropped recently, she took to afternoon walks in significantly more layers.)
“If you live in town, don’t be too envious,” she said in an online post. “Believe me, I pay plenty of property taxes for the right to walk around outside in my nightclothes.”
Owens will participate in BooksAlive! 2009 at Gulf Coast Community College in Panama City on Feb. 6 and 7, where “The Cracker Kitchen” will premier. She also will be at the Chautauqua Center in DeFuniak Springs Jan. 29-31.
Puzzled up North
Her thoughtfulness and her lovely and often hilarious turns of phrase have made her a favorite of the book tour crowds on both sides of the Mason-Dixon, to whom she has sometimes described herself as a “Southerner of the Cracker persuasion.” The term amused her audiences, but she found they had very different reasons for laughing, depending on their geographical origins.
“Cracker” was especially looked down on in the North.
“They found the word depreciating and naïve, and inevitably, someone would ask why I’d so proudly associate myself with a word that had such a loaded historic connotation,” she said in her biographical note.
“To them, it was clear that Cracker equaled ignorant, racist, toothless and base. To me, it meant a whole different thing, and in time, re-educating my audience over the roots and true heritage of the word became an interesting sideline.”
Webster’s dictionary notes the disparity. It variously defines a “Cracker” as a contemptuous term for “poor white,” and as a humorous usage identifying a person born or living in Florida or Georgia.
“People had such a visceral response” to the term, she said.
As Owens explains it, Cracker culture is a about rugged individualism, love of family, and really good cornbread. The term has been in use since Elizabethan England, when it meant “braggart.” In Colonial America, a term used for poor people was “corn cracker,” as they ate only cheap corn. In the South, some say it came from the noise of whips cracking as pioneers chased scrub cattle through the palmetto flats.
Yesterday’s Cracker was the underclass of working poor, living simple lives centered on family, church and an oral tradition full of funny stories about family and church. Stories most often shared as they passed food around the table.
Cultural cooking
Over time, her association with the term landed Owens an invitation to speak at a Cracker symposium in Fernandina with two state experts: Ron Haase, whom she calls the father of neo-Cracker architecture, and Dana Ste. Claire, author of “Cracker Culture in Florida History.”
“It made for a merry meeting, and at the end of the program, Dana told me I had to record some of my family stories and write a cookbook, because as the state expert, there were three things Crackers were deadly serious about: food and laughter and food,” she said.
Owens said she wrote “The Cracker Kitchen” without breaking a sweat, linking old family recipes with plenty of stories and history. Being a regular blogger got her “in the groove,” she said, for telling short personal tales, which she had already been incorporating into her speaking engagements.
“I had no idea I’d ever publish it,” she said. “Every recipe I wrote down had a story, the kind of story you’d tell sitting on the porch with your cousins. … (The book) is my love letter to them, my Valentine for them.”
It was the editing process that got her goat.
“If you’re ever edited a cookbook, you know that it isn’t a job for the faint of heart,” Owens said. “I spent months clarifying whether a recipe required sea salt or regular salt, sweet butter or salted. I have never agonized so much over the merits of sweet onion (as opposed to yellow onion) my entire life.”
Owens said some of the recipes were included for their historical value: She never has actually trapped and eaten an armadillo, for instance. And though she couldn’t point to a favorite recipe in her book, she confessed a soft spot for tomato gravy (which seems to be a West Florida phenomenon, she added) and a love for fried chicken.
“I really could just eat fried chicken every day of my life,” she said. “Especially Mama’s recipe.”
