Counterclockwise from front: Benjamin Franklin Day, Robert Brock, Ann Brock, Priscilla Day, Juanita Day Brock, Iris Day Giddiens, Gloria Giddiens

Does this story start with me, or does it start somewhere in the distant past? That is a question I have struggled with for the last 26 years of my life.

Let’s start with now: Present-day, Florida. Jacksonville, to be exact. This has been my home since 2018. Tough years. Cruel, nasty, political ones. Florida is always the butt of jokes and it has done an excellent job of showing its ass. Our political leaders and the people who support them have attacked Black and LGBTQ+ Floridians in the name of cheap political points. Anti-Semitism has become a commonplace part of daily life. Mar-a-Lago. Parkland and Pulse. This is Ground Zero for America’s Culture War and it is one of the easiest places to count the casualties. 

Many of my friends moved out or are planning to leave. They urge me to do the same. Many of them have lived here their entire lives. I don’t blame them one bit. Florida has never been an uglier place than it is right now. There is no peace here. There is a daily political and psychological conflict that wears you down. What was a sunny, optimistic tourist state during the Bob Graham years has turned toxic and putrid.

And yet I am still here.

But why? And how has what I have seen changed me? 

Let’s go back to Levy County, Florida somewhere between 1911 and 1913.

A place known as “the scene of shouting matches, legal dust storms, shootouts and various forms of hanky panky.” This is where three sisters – Priscilla, Louvenia and Ida – board an orphan train headed for the Children’s Home Society in Jacksonville, Fla. 

An orphan train is just what it sounds like and probably a little worse. This is from Wikipedia:

The orphan trains operated between 1854 and 1929, relocating about 200,000 children. The co-founders of the orphan train movement claimed that these children were orphaned, abandoned, abused, or homeless, but this was not always true. They were mostly the children of new immigrants and the children of the poor and destitute families living in these cities. Criticisms of the program include ineffective screening of caretakers, insufficient follow-ups on placements, and that many children were used as strictly slave farm labor.

Many orphan train children went to live with families that placed orders specifying age, gender, and hair and eye color. Others were paraded from the depot into a local playhouse, where they were put up on stage, thus the origin of the term "up for adoption." According to an exhibit panel from the National Orphan Train Complex, the children "took turns giving their names, singing a little ditty, or 'saying a piece.’" According to Sara Jane Richter, professor of history at Oklahoma Panhandle State University, the children often had unpleasant experiences. "People came along and prodded them, and looked, and felt, and saw how many teeth they had."

The oldest, Priscilla, was somewhere between 10 or 12 years old. They were poor children, and they came from a class of people that an old history book called “whiskey drinkers, Saturday night dancers, Sunday hunters and profane swearers.” Their life had already been hard up to this point, and there were no signs it was getting anything but much, much worse. 

Boys were more readily adopted than girls in those days, mostly because the people adopting them were farmers looking for labor. It wasn’t uncommon for these children to live in barns. Things for the girls weren’t much better.

Louvenia was taken to the Florida State Hospital in Chattahoochee, Fla., suffering from epilepsy, where she died in 1918 during the Great Influenza pandemic. She spent three years in Chattahoochee alone before she died because no one knew what else to do with people suffering from epilepsy back then. Her death certificate lists no parents. 

Priscilla was adopted by a family whose son beat her mercilessly – something that makes me cry to even type. The State of Florida eventually took her back to CHS.

An older couple, Charlie and Mollie Shores, who lived near Chipley (in the Florida Panhandle) wanted a child – not as labor, but to love. They adopted Ida, who cried for her sister Priscilla until the Shores went back and adopted her, too – something that makes me cry to even type. 

Their life in Chipley was full of farm work, but the Shores were kind, good people. This became their home, and a place they remembered fondly. 

Charlie believed that a woman could do anything a man could do and as a grandfather, he always encouraged Priscilla’s daughter to research her own information. When the radio reported on war, he helped her follow the troop’s locations on a map. He taught them how to read, write, think and survive. 

Priscilla is my great-grandmother, and the only reason I know these details is because my grandmother, Iris; my mom, Gloria; and my aunt, Lisa spent more than 30 years tracing her story. In those days record keeping was so bad in the backwaters that Priscilla was unsure of what year she was born. One of Ida’s granddaughters, Suzie, also became obsessed with solving the mystery, and they would all eventually link up. 

Oddly enough, all the sleuths shared a passion for the story, but also for veracity, and rather than rely on the hearsay that powers most family narratives, they relentlessly pursued photographs, official records and other documents that would verify the story and provide more detail. I have to think this is the influence of Grandpa Shores paying dividends several generations into the future. 

They spent their spare time traveling along Florida’s Forgotten Coast looking for headstones and census records. Social history was important, too – understanding the conditions the girls lived in came from a place of deep empathy. I couldn’t have written the last few paragraphs without the detailed book that Suzie put together and copied for me. The work they’ve put together is voluminous and goes back a few generations before the three girls. It’s as probably as good of a history as exists of one of these wild backwoods Florida families, and it was done with love. 

And while this work was happening, their own lives were added to the Florida story. Iris rolled cigars in Ybor City before moving to Panama City, where she worked long hours at places like Hardee’s while raising her girls. Lisa became a nurse and cared for the Bay County community before traveling to Orlando, Sarasota, Fort Myers and Tampa for work. Suzie worked for the telephone company in Jacksonville as Florida rapidly grew and its communication network expanded. My mom moved to the Treasure Coast and raised yours truly before moving to Texas and divorcing. She worked long hours at Sam’s Club to put me through high school. 

In Texas we cursed the cold and the money- and status-obsessed ways of the people who lived there. We told Florida stories to each other until they became our own myths – histories both personal and political, our favorite seafood and songs that reminded us of certain places. As soon as I had enough money, I took my mom back to see Iris and Lisa, who she hadn’t seen in a decade. About a decade later I moved back, and a few months after that, I went and got Mom. She moved in with Iris and Lisa, first beating colon cancer and then being a caregiver for Iris until Iris died earlier this year. 

I guess we have all wanted to write ourselves into this Florida story for those three girls and for all they survived. We did not want them or what they went through to be forgotten. Remembering is an act of mercy.

And everything about their story has taught us more about Florida, its environment, its classes, its politics, its beauty and its cruelty. Remembering is an act of survival. 

In the five or six generations that we have traced, you can step back and see the broader strokes of world history. The Civil War, in which many of the poor people of Florida were too sick, too hungry or too lawless to fight. The tumult of Reconstruction and the brutal industrial days of the Gilded Age that followed. The uneven social reforms of the new century. The pandemics and epidemics, one after another. War. Racial violence. Immigration and migration. The Depression. Tourism and a rapidly changing landscape. Air conditioning. War. Media. Rock and roll. Disney World. Condos. Hurricanes, one after another. 

The whiskey drinkers, Saturday night dancers, Sunday hunters and profane swearers of that Old Florida are almost entirely gone now, and, considering how brutal their lives were, that may be a good thing. They were not mythologized like the Western cowboys or the Irish and Italian immigrants of the Northeast. And yet the modern stories of struggle that the 2017 film The Florida Project are based on seem to echo Priscilla, Ida and Louvenia’s story. As much as Florida has changed, it remains the same as it ever was.

We all come from somewhere, some from wealth and some from poverty. Some from sickness and some from health. I come from these women and I come from this story. It is not the sum of who I am, but it is one of the biggest parts of the equation.

My Florida story Takes place in a different time. But, again and again, I have reached back for this throughline to guide me into the future. 

I was born into financial security and stability. My dad was an Air Force veteran and a blue collar guy from the Great Plains who did well as a plumber. His family wasn’t rich either, but they were big and they knew how to stick together. They were not simply hard workers, they were disciplined workers, and wherever they went, a hard-earned stability followed not far behind. They were farmers and cowboys and soldiers. And they were honest and consistent. 

My mom drove nice cars and stayed at home to raise me. Her and my dad worked hard, managed money well and sent me to good schools where I received a great education. My mom took me to the library until I checked out nearly every book in the kid’s section. I ran free across a Florida that seems like an idyllic dream compared to the one Priscilla grew up in – mine was fishing poles and vacation bible schools and fruit stands run by mellow hippies. In Texas I went to college – the first in my family – and eventually earned a master’s degree. I worked in higher education and often had the ears of wealthy and influential people. I made friends with the sons and daughters of the landed, the powerful and the secure. 

While I can move among these folks with ease – and after nearly 40 years in their presence, experience – their story is not my story. This became especially evident when I moved to Jacksonville, a city where the divide between the working and wealthy classes is as wide as anywhere I’ve seen. That divide is not only economic, it’s cultural – like the difference between Ronnie Van Zant and Pat Boone. 

Eventually, the conversation among these folks and the professional classes they employ will turn to the culture, the food, the dress and the ways of those other folks – the genetic and spiritual heirs of the Saturday night dancers. And they will mock them. They will mock the songs they sing. They will judge them as dumb or dangerous. They will blame them for every trouble. And, finally, they will disregard them as they make decisions about the future of the city and how its limited resources will be spent. These decisions are as much about who should be left out as who should be let in. 

And try as I might, I will never be able to play along. Because, to me, they are talking about Priscilla and Ida and Louvenia and Lisa and Gloria and Iris and all the others I don’t have time to name here. Where they see weeds I see wildflowers, blown by the wind and ready to bloom in good soil. Where they see grotesque, I see grit. Where they see callouses, I see resilience. When I place my bet, it will always be for Priscilla and her children. 

Many other wildflower seeds end up in Florida soil. Whenever I hear about how much better things are in Europe I am reminded that several hundred years ago the English rounded up their poor, criminal, immigrant and ill on boats bound for the American Southeast. When someone tells me about the social conscience and safety net of the Northeast, I am reminded of the profits made on the backs of slave labor right here in Florida. When someone tells me about the beauty of the mountains I am reminded of the Depression-era migrant workers who drifted down here in search of food and a better life. And the story goes on and on – the Ohioans and Michiganders of the Great Recession, the Jewish community in South Florida. Many take root here and they bloom in this complex cultural tapestry. From Florida you can see the entire world.

That’s not to say I don’t love the rest of the world. I stood in awe at the Cliffs of Moher and gawked at the antiquities of the Louvre. I am thrilled by New York City Transit and I let the wind whip through my hair as I drove down Ventura Highway in the sunshine. I dream of Buenos Aires and Tokyo and I would love to see Lagos. Working for some prestigious university in Boston sounds like a dream that I can only imagine would make Priscilla proud. But I will always track that Levy County mud in on the bottom of my shoes.

At times I have been accused of being optimistic or even naive, but I do not believe this to be so. I do not hold hope that things will get better in Florida. In fact, all I have seen since I’ve lived here are things getting worse – and most distressingly, its one-of-a-kind natural environment being gobbled up and destroyed by cheap concrete and poorly-placed palm trees.

I see a state whose considerable resources are still not enough to sustain the population explosion of the last few decades. I see an arrogant and foolish Republican Party hellbent on squeezing every last drop of profit out of this beautiful place before jumping overboard. I see a corrupt and superficial Democratic Party who can only muster contempt for the people they so badly want to rule over. I see a media that largely views Florida as merely a stopping point on the way to better jobs in better cities. 

And everywhere more roads, more strip malls, more gated communities and more pollution. I do not hold out much hope for a place that is collapsing one sinkhole at a time. 

So, whether to stay or not is a difficult question. On one hand, like a lot of other people who leave home in search of a better life, I carry my stories with me wherever I go. I am Florida and Florida is me. On the other hand, I am reminded of a phrase often heard in Florida around the holidays – “next year in Havana” or “next year in Jerusalem.” I already left once. These are my next years. 

My own abilities to enact change here are next to none. I am not here to make things better. I am here to be a witness. I am here to use my limited privilege in hopes that I might, even by accident, be someone’s Charlie Shores. I am here because I would not be here at all were it not for Ida’s tears. I am here because I remember.