Floridians love snakes. Even the Floridians with an atavistic fear of snakes love them. Or, at the very least, there’s a deep fascination. Snakes of Florida, a Facebook group to which I belong, evinces this in post after post. The group is open to “individuals who like snakes,” and the group description makes clear, in firm language, that they are not receptive to photos of dead snakes or suggestions of violence toward snakes. But in the posts themselves — which are generally enthralling, with good photography to boot – there’s often more than a little trepidation in the comments. For every poster lauding the beauty of a six-foot diamondback rattlesnake in the Ocala National Forest, there are more than a few comments featuring fearful emojis, animated images of people running away, or even a blunt “I don’t understand why people love venomous snakes.” Which makes one think, why is this commenter even a member of the group?
Anyway, as we discussed in our last edition of “Florida Snake Stories” (in March of 2021), Floridians’ relationships with snakes have produced some great and not-so-great narratives. The best of these often find subtle ways to utilize snakes, and their archetypal/mythical legacies in Western culture, as symbols of our anxieties and insecurities – about our loved ones, about the environment and its denizens, about ecological degradation, and so on. Less often, as with the stories we talked about in “Florida Snake Stories” (Zora Neale Hurston’s “Sweat” and Lauren Groff’s “At the Round Earth’s Imagined Corners”), they are vehicles of deliverance from oppression or abuse for characters, and that denouement is often delivered in richly ironic ways, to characters who richly deserve it.
Two stories that I mentioned in that post fall firmly into the former category. Shane Hinton’s “Pinkies” (2015) and Groff’s “Snake Stories” (2018) take much different paths to get there, but they both arrive at a vision of snakes as physical manifestations of their narrators’ neurotic, exaggerated fears. Specifically, anxieties arising from raising a family in a state that seems insidiously hostile and inimical to their well-being. Of course, being set in Florida, it’s easy to imagine these snakes as metaphorical vessels for any number of human-engineered threats to one’s family, most often taking the form of laws designed to weaken public safety, education, and environmental protection. But to their credit, neither Hinton nor Groff pick this low-hanging fruit by making explicit symbolic evocations.
“Snake Stories” opts for grounded realism in its depiction of a suburban wife and mother, not a native Floridian, who feels uneasy at best in her new home state. She almost seems jealous of her sons (who are native Floridians) and their carefree, inquisitive, and pointedly non-neurotic interactions with nature. Visceral snake imagery abounds, often in the form of snakes doing normal snake things but exaggerated in the narrator’s own mind to threatening and ominous proportions. I spoke of this story in the previous “Florida Snake Stories” in a tone that might have seemed rather dismissive, as a tale of “suburban mommy paranoia,” and that is not inaccurate. But that doesn’t mean it’s a bad story. Indeed, one will note in most of Groff’s Florida-set stories, apprehension of the natural world is essentially functions as background music. There’s references to The Iliad (a “blood-red monstrous snake . . . an omen clear and bright”) and to the portents suggested by finding a snake in one’s toilet. “Walk outside in Florida, and a snake will be watching you,” the narrator asserts early on. She is, in her own words, “an alien in this place,” and beyond her neuroses, it’s easy to put ourselves in her place; we might easily sub out snakes for any particular phobia or setting that triggers us in some way.
Hinton, on the other hand, goes in the opposite direction, with garishly outlandish settings and characters. He imagines a suburban Florida where predatory pythons roam the streets and are such a threat to pets and humans that sightings of them prompt school lockdowns. The narrator’s wife is pregnant (with, it seems, a gigantic litter of babies, but that’s a whole other dimension of the story), and the fears associated with raising a family in a fraught, dangerous environment give rise to all sorts of ludicrous protective measures in the name of staving off python attacks, which are up 500% over last year, as a local newscaster grimly informs viewers. The couple’s own obstetrician gives them more advice about trapping and killing snakes than he does about the wife’s pregnancy. He shares with them that he and his wife have themselves lost “some” of their children to python attacks. This is essentially a tale of suburban-daddy-paranoia, and although it quite clearly doesn’t take itself too seriously, the real-life fears that might pervade the consciousness of a dad-to-be are detectable, if unnamed, beneath the glorious nonsense of the killer-python plot. (The block-party barbecue following the killing of a giant python that has eaten an adult woman in the neighborhood is an especially glorious example of said nonsense.) It’s worth noting, by the way, that no python has ever – ever – attacked and killed a human being in the wild; all python-related fatalities (in the US, anyway) have been inflicted by pet snakes that were underfed or otherwise neglected. Larry Perez’s fascinating book A Snake in the Grass, which we discussed with him on this podcast in Season 2, is a great repository of such information.
The most sage and sober advice about living with snakes is provided by the commenters within the Snakes of Florida forums: “No need to terrorize the snake.” “Admire, observe, take pictures,” and then go back to minding your business.
