American Ghost

by Janis Owens

  Tempy wasn’t too forgiving of either their pale skin or their heathen ways and would usually conclude, “Never had no sense, not one of ’em.” She would sometimes allow with a faint twitch of her cheek, “But they were funny. They could by God make you laugh.”

  • • •

  It was a tradition the latest generation of Hoyts continued for many years to come, Carl’s humor his chief device in converting the masses to the Gospel via his sermons, which are still broadcast practically round the clock on the different Christian broadcasting networks, squeezed in between the likes of Creflo Dollar and Kenneth Copeland. (Carl is the fattest of the three and talks like the King of the Hillbillies. He often speaks of his father.) Lena is still often caught on tape, sitting there in the front pew in her elaborate Spencer Alexis creations, watching Carl with a childlike devotion that isn’t mere posturing, but wholly (and weirdly) sincere. Her sister-in-law is occasionally at her side, listening to her brother’s sermons with a look of mild, dry curiosity.

  The camera seldom lingers long on her as she has the unsettling habit of rolling her eyes at his more outlandish doctrinal claims. This seditious gesture has once or twice been caught on tape and broadcast around the globe. Next to her are her children: her stepson, Brice, now well into his teens, and a set of perfectly matched little girls, identical twins. The boy is light-eyed; the girls are dark enough that members of their uncle’s flock sometimes ask them what they are, as their accent is straight out of Br’er Rabbit stories, though they are obviously not your typical Southern belles.

  They are friendly children and don’t mind the question, but grin and tell them they are Jewish Crackers, which is what their paternal grandfather calls them, with affection. (“They talk slow, but they talk a lot,” he explains to his neighbors in Coral Springs.) Their mother sometimes describes them, with equal affection, as Little Black Dutch, and she should know, as she is the unofficial state expert on the breed, working on her third grant with the Department of the Interior when she’s not busy with small design projects around Cleary, or serving as the chair of the local Historic and Preservation Committee. Their father works in Tallahassee for the State; probably will till he retires.

  If you run into him at the Super China Buffet or the 4th Quarter on North Monroe, don’t be afraid to approach, as he is still a talker, this Sam Lense, and he never eats alone if he can help it. He’ll be glad to discuss the Muskogee Creek or Miami football or the dismantling of the DCF at the hands of the nefarious Republicans, or even the scar on his chest, faded in middle age to a pale silver-gray. He’s never been the kind of man ashamed of his own myth, or his personal scars—even the ones that almost killed him.

  Acknowledgments

  This story has deep roots in the past, and I must first thank four great professors from my undergrad days at UF: James Haskins, Smith Kirkpatrick, Richard Scher, and Harry Crews. They set me on this journey many years ago, and I couldn’t have told it without them, nor without the firsthand testimonies of a handful of truth-tellers who had the courage to meet my eye and give me a straight answer when I brought up the barbaric custom of spectacle lynching. It would have been easy to take a pass and pretend ignorance, but they didn’t, and for that I am grateful. My agents, Marly Rusoff and Mihai Radulescu, have held my hand a very long time with this book, and my editor, Whitney Frick, was heroic in helping forge it into the novel it is today. Writing is a mostly solitary pursuit, but I am blessed to be surrounded by a magical circle—my husband, Wendel, daughters Emily, Abigail, and Isabel, and their husbands, Evan, Johnny, and Christopher, and the darling Lily P. If that weren’t good fortune enough, I have fallen heir to friendships with some of the finest storytellers of the age: my poppa and mama, Pat and Cassandra Conroy, the late Doug Marlette, and the often imitated but inimitable Bernie Schein, who provided the final key. I tell all of you I love you so much that it almost seems trivial to say it, but you are my heart. Love, again.

  © ALBERT ISAAC

  JANIS OWENS is the author of three novels—My Brother Michael, Myra Sims, and The Schooling of Claybird Catts—and the cookbook memoir The Cracker Kitchen. The last and only daughter of a Pentecostal preacher turned insurance salesman, she inherited her love of storytelling from her parents. She lives in Newberry, Florida.

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  • THE SOURCE FOR READING GROUPS •

  JACKET DESIGN BY JASON HEUER

  JACKET PHOTOGRAPH © NANCY LANDIN / MILLENNIUM IMAGES, UK

  COPYRIGHT © 2012 SIMON & SCHUSTER

  Previous works by Janis Owens

  My Brother Michael

  Myra Sims

  The Schooling of Claybird Catts

  The Cracker Kitchen

  A Scribner Reading Group Guide

  American Ghost

  QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

  1. In the opening paragraph of the book, we learn that Jolie and Sam’s relationship was “barely three months long, and as quickly ended as it had begun”. How did this knowledge affect your reading of the first part of the book? Why do you think the author chose to disclose this information up front?

  2. The book is broken up into two parts: “The Indian Study” and “When the Chickens Came Home to Roost.” How would you characterize each part of the story? How do they tell the same story and/or different stories?

  3. Some of the characters change remarkably from teenagers to adults. Carl and Lena, for instance, both reinvent themselves in adulthood. Is the same true for Sam and Jolie? Discuss these characters as teenagers versus adults. How do they change? How do they stay the same?

  4. Everyone, including Sam, seems to look with suspicion on Jolie’s relationship with Hugh. Discuss their unique relationship, including its sudden dissolution.

  5. Discuss the significance of the “fangers,” or fingers, throughout the story. What do they represent in general and to different characters?

  6. After so many years and so much silence, why do you think Jolie decides to speak out about the fingers at her town meeting?

  7. Jolie tells Sam that she knew she would lose him because “Because women in Hendrix lose everything, eventually—friends, money, mothers. It’s a losing kind of place. You tremble every minute for your love”. Do you think this is a belief that Jolie felt resigned to or compelled to fight against?

  8. Discuss the narration throughout the story. While Jolie comes through as the main character, how does the third-person narrator shape the story?

  9. While there are several stories unraveling throughout the course of the book, they all somehow tie back into the lynching of Henry Kite. Talk about how each of the main characters is affected by Kite. How did reading Uncle Ott’s experience of the lynching affect your view of Kite or of what happened to him and his family?

  10. Why do you think Carl waited so long to tell Sam who shot him? Why do you think Carl told Sam and not Jolie?

  11. Discuss the resolution of the mysteries surrounding Sam’s shooting and the missing fingers. Were the answers they got enough for both Sam and the Fraziers? Where do you think the fingers were and what might have caused someone to turn them in, seemingly out of nowhere?

  12. Who or what do you think the title American Ghost refers to? Do you think the ghost is one person? Discuss the impression it gives of the story and what you think it might mean.

  ENHANCE YOUR BOOK CLUB

  1. American Ghost is a fictional representation of current efforts to uncover the truth behind the famous Claude Neal lynching that took place in Marianna, Florida, in 1934. Learn more by visiting www.exploresouthernhistory.com/claudeneal.html or reading The Beast in Florida: A History of Anti-Black Violence by Marvin Dunn (see www.upf.com/book.asp?id=DUNNX002). Or read Ben Montgomery’s investigative piece in the Tampa Bay Times: www.tampabay.com/features/humaninterest/article1197360.ece.

  2. Does your hometown have any dark history? Or perhaps it has a proud past? Do a little research online and
bring any findings to share at your book club meeting.

  3. Janis Owens is not only a great storyteller, but she can cook, too! Check out her cookbook-cum-memoir, The Cracker Kitchen, or make the dishes from the book on the following pages for your next book club meeting.

  Enhance Your Book Club Discussion by Preparing These Dishes Excerpted from Janis Owens’s The Cracker Kitchen

  Let me begin with a big country welcome to my kitchen. Just come on in and don’t bother with the dog—he don’t bite. Kick off your shoes and make yourself at home. Pour yourself some tea (there in the refrigerator; it should be cold) and brace yourself for a good feed, as Crackers aren’t shy about eating but go for it full throttle, in it for the sheer, crunchy glory.

  Though our roots are in the colonial South, we are essentially just another American fusion culture, and our table and our stories are constantly expanding, nearly as fast as our waistlines. We aren’t ashamed of either, and we’re always delighted with the prospect of company: someone to feed and make laugh, to listen to our hundred-thousand stories of food and family and our long American past.

  For Crackers are as indigenous to the New World as long-leafed tobacco, though we’ve never really been the toast of the town. We’re the Other South: eighth-generation children of immigrants who came to America on big wooden ships long before the Civil War and steadily moved inland, the pioneers of three centuries. We mostly settled along the southern half of the eastern seaboard, long before the War of Secession, but we never darkened the doors of Tara or Twelve Oaks unless we were there to shoe mules or to work as overseers. We lived and thrived outside plantation society, in small towns and turpentine camps and malarial swamps. We’re the Rednecks, the Peckerwoods, the Tarheels, and the Coon-ass, and a hundred other variations besides. We are the working-class back that colonial America was built upon, the children of its earliest pioneers, who have lately tired of hiding our light under a bushel, and have said to hell with all the subterfuge.

  Let me take a moment to validate my own Cracker pedigree and credentials, as I am what Princess Diana was to the English: a modern female scion of an ancient line born in rural Florida when Destin was a shallow, nameless bay and Orlando the shy younger sister of central Florida’s true metropolis, Lakeland. I grew up in rural Florida, which was still segregated back then, and from outward appearances we looked as assimilated as our white neighbors, except for the fact that we ate squirrel and talked like raccoons and carried pocket knives. We were something of a puzzle to everyone, even ourselves, as there were no accurate archetypes in contemporary American culture that reflected our particular past. Our great-great-grandfathers had fought and died for the Cause, and though we wept buckets at the railroad depot scene in Gone With the Wind, we had few emotional and historic ties to the ever-popular, ever-mythic plantation South.

  We self-referred as Rednecks, Hillbillies, and Country Boys, shying away from the time-honored description: Crackers, as it was a name that had, in the latter half of the century, taken on a sinister connotation. Though the word had been in circulation for time out of mind, it had come to describe a portion of the population that was the nemesis of the social-gospel, julep-sipping South. Crackers were the Bad Guys in the Civil Rights Movement: crew-cut, toothless miscreants who wore George Wallace tie clips and used the N-word in combination with every adjective on earth. They were ill read, over-churched, whiskey-addicted; prone to incest and hookworm.

  We were some of that, and some not. (My Cracker grandfather’s best friend was a black sharecropper, and a fellow black sawyer at the heading mill had once saved his life by lifting a truck off his chest.) Black people were intertwined in our history in a way that is hard to explain, and old-school Crackers would willingly own up to mixed blood in a humorous manner (“a black cat in our alley”). But for the most part, having so much as a drop of black blood was taboo. Being white was our ace in the hole, you might say, and the single characteristic that set us apart from our fellow poor folk, though middle- and upper-class whites treated us with (if possible) more contempt than they did people of color.

  Our role as cultural outsider was so ingrained that we didn’t overly labor to explain our histories to our fellow townies. We lived lives centered around our churches, marrying within them and giving much credence to the Lord’s command to “come out from among them.” We came out, and we stayed out. It wasn’t till the late 1970s, when Disney moved to Florida and every Yankee on earth built a condo on the coast, that the lily-skinned Florida-born natives began to self-refer as Crackers as a way of separating their old Florida culture from the flood of Yankee transplants. In this translation, being a Cracker meant your family had lived in Florida for at least three generations, had Southern roots, and among themselves, still talked like raccoons. It became a source of pride, and eventually the word gained national recognition as a way to describe white rural Southerners. And that’s what we are proud to be.

  Iced Tea

  The serene nectar of the gods. What more can I say about this all-powerful liquid? It has caffeine. It has sugar. It has good antioxidants and will make your soul sing. It is the single item in the Cracker repertoire I couldn’t live without, though old-timers were equally fond of ice water. In their day, it was a delicacy, and old Cracker daddies had an annoying habit of making their wives and children fetch it for them whenever they wanted it. I have never been a great fetcher for anyone, and tea is my own obsession. I am giving you the straight scoop on how I make it, though mileage varies, as do recipes. Some people put in lemon or mint, but I leave mine cold and strong and a little less sweet than the liquid sugar you get in restaurants. It’s simple to make. Anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to blind you with science.

  2 quarts water, divided

  4 family-sized tea bags

  1 cup or so sugar

  1. Fill a large kettle or medium saucepan with 1 quart fresh water. Heat over high heat for about 4 minutes.

  2. Just before it boils (little bubbles will appear on the sides), move it off the burner and toss in the tea bags.

  3. Put something on top to trap the steam (Mama used to put a china saucer on the top of her kettle) and let steep for at least 10 minutes.

  4. Pour the sugar into a half-gallon pitcher and add the still-warm tea. Stir, then add the remaining 1 quart water and stir a little more.

  5. You can serve it over ice now, but I prefer to put a lid on the pitcher and chill it in the refrigerator till it gets nice and cold, so I don’t have to dilute it with too much ice.

  Makes 2 quarts

  Wilted Country Salad

  The beauty of this old-school Cracker salad is that it is supposed to be wilted, so there are no worries if you get chatting and forget to serve it right away. This salad will not lose its bounce.

  2 heads leaf lettuce

  6 green onions, thinly sliced

  5 tablespoons cider vinegar

  1 tablespoon sugar

  1 teaspoon salt

  1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper

  6 strips thick-sliced bacon, cooked till crisp

  1. Rinse the lettuce, dry, and tear into bite-sized pieces.

  2. Combine the onions, vinegar, sugar, salt, and pepper in a medium pan and simmer over low heat for 2 minutes, till the sugar is dissolved. Turn off the heat and stir in the cooked bacon to make a light dressing.

  3. Just before serving, pour the hot dressing over the lettuce and toss.

  Serves 4

  Deviled Eggs

  Deviled eggs are the classic accompaniment to fried chicken or baked ham, though Mama makes them for any sit-down meal. The eggs are so celebrated in Southern cooking that specially made little crystal egg dishes are frequent wedding gifts for young Cracker brides, all built for the enjoyment and presentation of the simple deviled egg.

  6 hard-boiled eggs, peeled and cut lengthwise in half

  1/4 cup mayonnaise

  2 tablespoons minced onion

  2 tablespoons minced dill pickle />
  1/4 teaspoon pickle juice

  1/8 teaspoon salt

  1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper

  1/2 teaspoon dried dill

  1. Remove the egg yolks from the whites and put the yolks in a medium bowl. Mash with a fork till smooth.

  2. Add everything but the dried dill and stir well. Fill the empty egg whites with the mixture. If you’re taking them to a public function, sprinkle them lightly with dried dill, which will lend a slightly dill taste and pleasing color variation. It will send a message to friend and foe alike that you’re a Cracker who knows your way around a spice cabinet.

  Makes 12

  Hors d’oeuvre Pie

  My buddy Miss Helen gave me this recipe. She isn’t a Cracker by birth but Canadian (Canadian Yankees, we call them around here; a term both inaccurate and probably fighting words above the border). She has been a great audience for my stories for thirty years. When my first novel came out, another buddy of ours from church, Mr. Doug, wanted to read it, but he was blind and the book was too obscure to sell in audio. Miss Helen took the matter in hand and, over the course of many months, read it to him aloud to their equal enjoyment, as Doug was a New York Yankee who was much entertained by my Cracker oeuvre. I think the generosity of the gesture merits a lifetime membership to the Cracker species, something I know she has always aspired to.