Florida's best-known frontier folk are pure fiction, creations of author Patrick D. Smith in his 1984 novel "A Land Remembered."
MERRITT ISLAND | Florida doesn't have a Daniel Boone or Davy Crockett. With all due deference to de Leon and DeSoto, not to mention Chief Osceola, the state lacks a historical figure whose very name is a brand evoking pioneer-era self-reliance.
What Florida does have, though, is the MacIveys - straight-shooting Tobias and imperturbable Emma - who migrated southward from Georgia in 1858 and established a home in the desolation of the Big Scrub, enduring hardships unimaginable to the Disney generations. In the minds of many Floridians, Tobias and Emma MacIvey personify the hardiness of the state's earliest white residents.
What separates the MacIveys from Boone and Crockett is this: Tobias and Emma never drew breath. They never trapped a raccoon, cooked with cat-tail flour or swatted a mosquito.
Florida's best-known frontier folk are pure fiction, creations of author Patrick D. Smith in his 1984 novel "A Land Remembered."
Smith, 82, is now in the latter chapters of his own saga. He remains in a rehabilitation center on Merritt Island, on Florida's east coast, since falling the night before Thanksgiving and breaking his shoulder and hip and injuring his knee.
It's hard to overstate the ardor many Floridians feel for "A Land Remembered," sometimes called "the cracker Bible." For some, the fictional chronicle has become almost inseparable from their families' own histories.
Parents read the book aloud to their children. Others name their children after the book's human characters and their pets after its canine characters, Nip and Tuck.
Some Floridians on their deathbeds have asked relatives to read the book to them, choosing to have Smith's words usher them out of this life.
"I don't think there's anybody in the whole state - literary (figures), historians, whatever - that has as much ability to reach the general public as Patrick Smith," said James M. Denham, a history professor at Florida Southern College in Lakeland. "It's unbelievable to me how many people have read his work. That may be the only thing they've read about Florida. ... If they know anything, they know Patrick Smith."
Former state senator Rick Dantzler of Winter Haven, in an assessment shared by many Floridians, stated simply: "It's the greatest book written about Florida, in my opinion."
The man who is synonymous with Florida's "cracker" heritage was actually born in Mississippi in 1927 and didn't inhabit the Sunshine State until he was nearly 40.
Patrick Davis Smith grew up in Mendenhall, a flyspeck town in south-central Mississippi. His father was a career elected official, his mother a homemaker and writer of unpublished poetry.
By ninth grade, Smith was covering sports for a weekly publication, the Simpson County News. He joined the Merchant Marines at age 18, serving in North Africa and Europe, before enrolling at the University of Mississippi. Upon his graduation in 1947, Smith wrote for two newspapers in Jackson, operated a Studebaker dealership in Mendenhall and also owned a small cattle ranch.
In his early 20s, Smith composed his first novel, "The River Is Home." The book centered on a boy named Skeeter, a "swamp rat" growing up around the Pearl River in lower Mississippi.
Smith had a completed manuscript but no contacts in the publishing world. So one day he plucked a book off a shelf at a library in Mendenhall and saw it was published by Little, Brown, a prominent, Boston-based firm. Smith mailed his manuscript to the company with a cover letter reading simply: "Dear Editor: Please publish this book."
Little, Brown complied. Called to Boston for final revisions, Smith wound up sharing an office with another first-time author, J.D. Salinger, who was polishing up "The Catcher in the Rye."
As Smith recalled, Salinger's manuscript contained 50 uses of the "F-word," and his editor would allow only four. Salinger, Smith said, asked for his advice.
"If I had that word in my book even one time my mother would kill me," Smith replied.
Salinger, who died Wednesday, stuck with the publisher's allotment.
Smith returned to Ole Miss in 1958 to earn a master's degree, and his alma mater hired him as director of public relations in 1962, shortly before the school enrolled its first black student, James Meredith. Smith was assigned to escort Meredith to and from classes, a dicey task on a campus where rioting broke out, leaving two dead.
Smith drew upon that and other experiences from Mississippi in his 1967 book "The Beginning," a fictional chronicle of a small, Southern town undergoing school integration.
Smith's family had traveled through Florida during his childhood, and his wife, Iris, hailed from DeLand. Smith became a Floridian in 1966, accepting a job as director of college relations at Brevard Community College in Cocoa. Pat and Iris, along with their children, Rick and Jane, settled into the house on nearby Merritt Island, where the couple has lived ever since.
Established in Florida, Smith decided he wanted his next book to explore the lives of the Seminoles living in and around the Everglades. There was one problem: He knew virtually nothing about the Seminoles. To rectify that, Smith determined he would spend his weekends on research trips to South Florida. One Friday he came home from work, packed a suitcase, told his wife goodbye and went to his car. He sat at the wheel for a long time, contemplating all the reasons it was foolish to go through with the plan, and eventually he retrieved the suitcase from the trunk and returned to the house. Smith, who has large ears and a heavily lined, down-turned mouth, repeated the routine for several weeks, and his self-deprecating recollection of the story became a laugh-inducing staple of his popular lectures years later. He finally overcame his fears and ventured to a Seminole village in the Big Cypress Swamp, but over several months he could find no Seminoles willing to educate a white interloper. Smith was on the verge of giving up when he was befriended by a young Seminole named James Billie. Billie, who would later become chairman of the Seminole Tribe of Florida, offered to tell Smith all about Seminole traditions. In 1973, Smith published "Forever Island," a tragic tale of a young Seminole fighting the development of his ancestral lands. Reader's Digest selected "Forever Island" for a volume of condensed books, and it soon gained attention outside the United States and was published in more than 30 languages. The book proved especially popular in the Soviet Union, earning Smith three invitations to the Communist nation. Smith drew on those experiences for his 1983 non-fiction book, "In Search of the Russian Bear." For his follow-up to "Forever Island," Smith set himself an even greater challenge. Curious about the shadowy realm of Florida's migrant labor camps, Smith set out to do some "physical research." Disguised in overalls, a work shirt and worn brogan shoes, Smith got a job picking vegetables at a labor camp near Homestead. "That was a bad time, really, for me," Iris Smith said. "We'd been told if they (the management) found out he was researching a book, he'd never come home again except in a pine box, and every time he left I held my breath until he got back. I was scared to death." "Angel City," an expose of the mistreatment of migrant laborers, created a sensation and prompted the Florida Legislature to craft new regulations covering agricultural work. The book was adapted for a 1980 TV movie starring Jennifer Jason Leigh and Ralph Waite of "The Waltons." Having established himself as a modern muckraker, Smith soon turned his attentions toward a much different project. It seemed no one had written a definitive, epic, historical novel of Florida, and Smith set out to fill that void.
AN EPIC UNDERTAKING
To prepare for "A Land Remembered," Smith first read every book he could find covering Florida's history, taking, as he recalled, "pounds of notes." But he wasn't content with secondary sources. Smith, who speaks with a pronounced drawl, spent two years traveling the state and talking to people with ancestry in Florida going back as many as nine generations. Smith's sources included members of his wife's family, which settled in Florida in the 1830s. Smith spent another year crafting "A Land Remembered," which covered 105 years and three generations in 403 pages. The story carried the MacIvey clan across Florida's key historical moments and trends of the 19th and 20th centuries - the Civil War, the cross-state cattle drives, the incursions of the railroads, the rise of the citrus industry, the great freeze of 1895, the real-estate boom of the 1920s, the hurricanes of 1926 and 1928, the emergence of tourism-fueled development and the ongoing marginalization of the native people. As he had with "Forever Island," Smith cast an elegiac mood, recording the ruinous effects of unrestrained building on Florida's land and animals. Smith sent his manuscript to Pineapple Press, an upstart publishing company based in Sarasota. June Cussen, the company's co-founder and executive editor, said she and her husband, David Cussen, immediately recognized the book's quality, but they couldn't have anticipated the impact the book would have. Published in 1984, "A Land Remembered" benefited from a favorable review in The New York Times Book Review. Smith fretted about including mild profanities, mindful of the mother who wouldn't have countenanced Salinger's F-words, but as his son Rick recalled, "His editor told him, 'Pat, when somebody gets bitten by an alligator they can't say, 'Oh, shucks.' " Cussen said the book slowly built a following, bolstered by word-of-mouth advertising. It now stands as the biggest seller in the Pineapple Press catalog, with sales of hundreds of thousands of copies, Cussen said. Smith's son, Rick, who operates the author's Web site, said sales of the book continue to rise each year. Patrick Smith said he didn't anticipate the book's popularity. "Not even in my wildest dreams," Smith said. "I had no idea it was going to take people like that."
AN AUTHENTIC SENSATION
Why do readers respond so passionately to "A Land Remembered"? The author mentions the book's "family values," its evocation of a time when the bonds of kinship were stronger. Cussen said the book taps into a sense of ecological loss. "I think that just the title of it resonates with people who have been in Florida a long time and understand not much of old Florida is left," Cussen said, "and much of that is due to human greed, which basically is the theme of this book, and sometimes inadvertent human greed." Smith's fans include native Floridians who feel a spark of recognition as they read "A Land Remembered." In the DVD "A Sense of Place," Smith tells of receiving a late-night phone call from an elderly man who thanked him for precisely describing his father's old homestead. He said many readers have made the same assumption.
Richard Powers of Frostproof said the book parallels his family history. His ancestors arrived in what is now Columbia County in the 1830s and later migrated to the scrub of Central Florida, just as the MacIveys drifted southward. Powers' great-grandfather made whips for cow hunters, and his grandfather constructed wagon wheels at Fort Basinger, near Lake Placid. "They lived the life that book tells about," said Powers, an artist whose paintings depict scenes from "A Land Remembered" (see related story). "There's people in this state who have no conceivable idea of the history of what's here. I think everybody that comes to this state to live ought to read that book. As far as I'm concerned, the only book that's better is the Bible." Frostproof citrus magnate Ben Hill Griffin III said "A Land Remembered" provides literary time travel. "I think it made the now generation acutely aware of the hardships and experiences that the early settlers in Florida had to put up with," he said. "You just envision the dirt floors and the wooden, log windows and roofs. It was a tough time back then, very tough." Frank Thomas, a folk musician and storyteller in Lake Wales, has known Smith since the 1980s. "He went out and he actually captured the spirit of the Crackers, and that's a rare thing to be able to do, to be able to capture that and translate it down onto paper," Thomas said. "So many people move here from other places and never make that connection. Home to them is somewhere else. But there are a few of them who move here to Florida and fall in love with it, and he's definitely one of them. He realized the treasure that was here and embraced it." Tina Peak, director of the Lake Wales Library, said Smith's book stands apart from most contemporary Florida novels. "I like his unique spin," Peak said. "A lot of writers in Florida now go in for craziness and the wacky Florida lifestyle and murders. Pat's books are just about Florida the way it was."
Smith said "A Land Remembered" was the favorite book of the late actor Buddy Ebsen, an Orlando native. The author said he's heard that singer Mel Tillis and actor Burt Reynolds, both Floridians, also revere his most famous work. But Smith seems just as appreciative of the place "A Land Remembered" occupies in the lives of common Floridians. He told of a letter from a woman who said her ailing husband had asked her to read the book to him as he lay in a hospital bed. The woman said she was reading her husband's favorite passage when he died. Rick Smith told of getting a call from an elderly man in poor health who ordered complete sets of his father's books for his grandchildren who were old enough to read. The man soon called again to order books for the grandchildren too young yet to read, saying he didn't expect to be around to present them later. Patrick Smith can't count the letters he has received from readers. Rick Smith, who moved to California after college, said he used to think his father was exaggerating when he described the volume of mail. "My wife and I came back about five years ago and had to clean up his office" - Rick's former bedroom - "and found he wasn't exaggerating," Rick said. "(The mail) filled an entire closet. There were literally thousands of letters."
DELUGE OF ACCLAIM
Smith made no attempt to duplicate his epic book. In 1987, he published "Allapattah," a companion to "Forever Island" in its depiction of Seminoles under threat from development and modernity. He followed that with a non-fiction book, "The Last Ride," co-written with Glen "Pee Wee" Mercer, a bull rider left paralyzed by a rodeo accident. "The Seas That Mourn," a novel Smith wrote in the 1950s based on his Merchant Marines experience, finally came out in 2003. Four years later, Rick Smith collected several of his father's short stories in the book "A White Deer." After retiring from Brevard Community College in 1988, Smith became one of Florida's most popular lecturers before calling it quits in 2004, as his health declined. Even before his recent accident, Smith was afflicted with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, for which he requires oxygen infusions.