Florida certainly does not lack for snakes – or stories about them.
According to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, the state “is home to more snakes than any other state in the Southeast.” Forty-four (or maybe 51, depending on the FWC publication), not including four non-native species, which you’ll definitely hear more about in this forum. Only six of those 44 are venomous, though. But a breathless, anxiety-inducing tale of an encounter with a red corn-snake is not likely to garner so much as a shrug except among the neurotically snake-phobic. So chances are if you read, view, or hear a snake story, it involves one of those scary six, or one of those four invasive varieties.
Two stories come to my mind when I think of Florida and snakes. Well, actually, I first think of George McCowan’s film Frogs (which we discussed extensively in season one of the podcast) and William Grefe’s equally ludicrous and exploitative Stanley, both of which will fuel the nightmares of anyone already inclined to see snakes as insidious predators waiting for an opportunity to waste their venom on a human they couldn’t possibly eat. But after those melodramatic fever-dreams for the easily frightened, there’s Zora Neale Hurston’s 1926 classic “Sweat,” and Lauren Groff’s much more recent “At the Round Earth’s Imagined Corners.” (Groff, for what it’s worth, has also penned a tale simply titled “Snake Stories,” which offers a relatively grounded narrative of not-from-Florida-suburban-mommy paranoia.)
I don’t want to spoil these excellent stories (seriously, you should read them and the rest of the contents of the books in which they appear), except to point out that they share some remarkable similarities. Both deal with toxic, abusive masculinity. The primal beauty and the hellish, withering heat of the Florida setting are emphasized in each – the effects of the heat and humidity on the characters’ psyches is apparent. In both stories the snakes are vessels for their protagonists’ revenge, in a sense. Neither is likely to stoke fear of snakes in readers who are not already afraid of them.
Hurston had a well-documented fascination with snakes, and the rattlesnake in “Sweat” embodies many of the symbolic, atavistic beliefs she herself evinced to observers. Groff, on the other hand, is much more down-to-earth in her depictions. However, as in “Sweat,” there’s a marked aversion to snakes on her female character’s part, and her antagonist, like Hurston’s, seems to channel all his abusive energies through them. Growing up (or enduring a marriage) under the thumb of an amateur herpetologist with intolerant tendencies exposes one to all kinds of dangers, such as copious amounts of snakes in and around the house. The snakes in these stories, though, are not pleased with being used in such ways (seriously, read how Sykes captures and brashly displays the rattlesnake to his buddies in “Sweat”). They have the last laugh. Or hiss, or rattle, as it were.
There are too many other Florida snake stories out there to mention. Some personal faves of mine, in addition to the aforementioned: Shane Hinton’s “Pinkies” (which takes place in a weirdly ecologically altered Florida where invasive Burmese pythons stalk suburban streets and regularly pretty on humans); Larry Perez’s nonfiction work Snake in the Grass (which describes his work removing invasive pythons from Everglades National Park and we’ll discuss with him in Season 2); and the brilliant Asylum film Mega-Python vs Gatoroid, which first aired on SyFy network in 2011. This no-budget feature embodies every batshit-crazy fear about Florida wildlife imaginable, and is worth “suffering” through for that alone.
