Vanessa Blakeslee | November 2021

Vanessa Blakeslee

In 1928, when Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was thirty-two, she and her husband bought a seventy-two-acre orange grove near Hawthorne, Florida, in a hamlet named Cross Creek, southeast of Gainesville. The two had been writing for the Rochester Journal, where Rawlings wrote a syndicated column called “Songs of the Housewife.” But Rawlings had been longing to abandon city life and devote herself to her own writing. When she received her share of the inheritance from her father’s farm in Maryland, she could wait no longer. Aside from childhood experiences at that farm and her grandfather’s in Michigan, where she had known “no duties… only delight,” she was wholly unprepared.¹ Her aunt, as relayed in Rawling’s book, Cross Creek, spared no harsh judgement: “You have in you,” she wrote her niece, “that fatal drop of Pearce blood, clamoring for change and adventure, and above all, for a farm. I never knew a Pearce who didn’t secretly long for a farm. Mother had one, Uncle Pierman was ruined by one, there was your father’s tragic experience. I had one, once—”²

But Rawlings was determined. This quiet determination and yearning drive the sharp imagery and lyricism of the writing that will soon emerge from her at Cross Creek, a voice that establishes itself quickly in the opening pages of that namesake book.

For myself, the Creek satisfies a thing that had gone hungry and unfed since childhood days. I am often lonely. Who is not? But I should be lonelier in the heart of a city. And as Tom says, “So much happens here.” I walk at sunset, east along the road. There are no houses in that direction, except the abandoned one where the wild plums grow, white with bloom in springtime. I usually walk halfway to the village and back again. No one goes, like myself, on foot, except Bernie Bass perhaps, striding firmly in rubber boots with his wet sack of fish over his shoulder.³

She had arrived intending to write romance novels, for money—unprepared not only for the farm, but for the profound effect of the wilderness and its people. Impossible also for her to know that in the next decade she will write numerous literary stories and novels under the editorial guidance of Maxwell Perkins. Her most famous will be the 1938 novel The Yearling, which will go on to win the Pulitzer Prize; other works, such as Cross Creek, will also foster acclaim.

But first, the journey she takes is a solitary one of courageous immersion into the unfamiliar.

Rawlings is both challenged and redeemed by the rural Florida landscape, unique and unforgiving, a redemption that permeates her descriptions. For her, the hammocks, from the Spanish hamaca, or rich and arable land, provide a return to Eden, a way to reclaim the lost gaze of childhood innocence. She writes,

Down through the west grove, which is the house grove, is the hammock on the shore of Orange Lake that has been from the beginning a true retreat. I went to it often in the early days but have not gone much since life itself has had more to offer. This has been not for disloyalty or for any treachery, but because at all times we turn to what we need only when we need it.⁴

And several paragraphs later:

I do not understand how anyone can live without some small place of enchantment to turn to.5

Do we not? What more do we need now, in these unprecedented perilous times, but to reacquaint ourselves with the enchantment of the remote and forgotten? What have we lost, in allowing our primary concept of enchantment to be redefined by consumerism and materialism, by Disney World and Harry Potter? Perhaps what American writers have been starved for this past half century hasn’t been so much writing workshops and conferences, but a rewilding. If so, what does that rewilding look like? “Enchantment lies in different things for each of us,” Rawlings writes.

For me, it is in this: to step out of the bright sunlight into the shade of orange trees; to walk under the arched canopy of their jadelike leaves; to see the long aisles of lichened trunks stretch ahead in a geometric rhythm; to feel the mystery of a seclusion that yet has shafts of light striking through it. This is the essence of an ancient and secret magic. It goes back, perhaps, to the fairy tales of childhood, to Hansel and Gretel… to all half-luminous places that pleased the imagination as a child. It may go back still farther, to racial Druid memories, to an atavistic sense of safety and delight in an open forest. And after long years of spiritual homelessness, of nostalgia, here is that mystic loveliness of childhood again. Here is home.⁶

What Rawlings is describing, too, is akin to the ancient Japanese practice of shinrin-yoku, or “forest-bathing”—simply being in the forest, not for any purpose other than to connect through one’s senses. She does not say she goes with her notebook, to write, nor her camera; all those things are left behind. Nor does she refer to her forays as “hikes” or “exercise”—rather, she is wandering, unfettered by time and obligation, whether among the hammock, or beneath the canopy of orange trees along her road. Only later, when she revisits those moments and selects for us what has imprinted upon her senses, are we riveted by her emergent insights.

The jungle hammock breathed. Life went through the moss-hung forest, the swamp, the cypresses, through the wild sow and her young, through me, in its continuous chain. We were all one with the silent pulsing. This was the thing that was important, the cycle of life, with birth and death merging one into the other in an imperceptible twilight and an insubstantial dawn. The universe breathed, and the world inside it breathed the same breath. This was the cosmic life, with suns and moons to make it lovely. It was important only to keep close enough to the pulse to feel its rhythm, to be comforted by its steadiness, to know that Life is vital, and one’s own minute living a torn fragment of the larger cloth.⁷

Shinrin-yoku need not be the only path to reclaim the enchantment nature offers, and writing is largely a process of “finding one’s way in the darkness.” But one wonders if without recovering that ancient sense of sacred home, as Rawlings had, at what kind of a disadvantage we may be when we sit down to write—that we may not be tapping the source of what is real and urgent, despite our command of technique, but are merely prisoners of our culture, skimming the surface. For soon after Rawlings’s relocation to Cross Creek, her writing soared. Scribner’s Magazine published her short fiction, and in 1932 she won the O. Henry Award for her story, “Gal Young Un.” The following year, she and her husband divorced. Rural life in the backwoods of Florida, he claimed, just didn’t suit him.

People are a preoccupation of Rawlings’s curious gaze, as much as the springs and hammocks, the flora and fauna. Upon taking up her farm duties, she writes as both an outsider and an insider, but an outsider first, and a great strength of Rawlings as essayist is her unabashed willingness to present not only others for who they are, but to turn that gaze upon herself. Rural survival demands cooperation, not isolation—obvious in theory but, as Rawlings finds, much different in practice. “I did not yet understand that in this way of life one is obliged to share, back and forth, and that as long as I had money for screens and a new floor, I was morally obligated to put out a portion of it to give some comfort to those who worked for me,” she writes of her initiation.⁸

What she describes is a freely given openness that we, as captives of a dominant culture, tend to regard with wariness and awe. Rawlings comes to understand what we might call a “gift economy,” and its necessity in living amongst the wilderness, through hardship and disaster. When bush fires strike and threaten to burn down the home of the impoverished Mrs. Bernie Bass, she comes running to Rawlings for help. He summons the men who are working in her orange groves to fight the fire—“hard and evil work.”⁹ Trials by fire and frost, literally and figuratively, forge the characters within the community, and in turn, their relationships among one another. Living more closely with the earth fosters a social justice that we, in our Industrial matrix, have been struggling to reclaim by imposition, and failing.

“I suppose there is nowhere in the world a more elemental exchange of goods than among ourselves at the Creek,” Rawlings writes later in the book, as her understanding and position at the Creek deepens. “The exchange does not even become barter and trade. We merely return favors. Old Boss uses my truck to haul his vegetable crops to the station and I use his mules for my occasional light plowing. We have never sat down to figure which has the higher rental value, for it does not matter.”¹⁰

Rawlings’s growth, her arc as narrator throughout Cross Creek, is our growth. As readers, we enter this place as blithely unaware of the Creek’s unspoken moral code, one that has been long forgotten among the sophisticated urban dwellers—how we as human beings might simply take care of one another, but encounter it in the book in their own language:

Old Boss said, “The Creek doesn’t amount to anything. The people don’t amount to anything. But if you’re sick and have no money, they’ll cook for you and fetch it to you, and they’ll doctor you, and if you get past their doctoring, they’ll send for a doctor and pay his bill. And if you die, they’ll take up a collection and bury you. I figure it’s just as close to Heaven here as any other place.”¹¹

What might we learn from the individuals Rawlings so earnestly and deftly portrays here, in reclaiming some of what has been lost, overwritten in the decades since by the crush of our consumer society? For as the narrative unfolds there is a good deal of ignorance among her neighbors at the Creek, along with wisdom. One gets the sense that she did not anticipate writing about social justice, but finds herself in battle, a crusader. “The rich, the well-favored, the well-situated, are surrounded with a confusing protective mass of extraneous and irrelevant matter that tends to hide the substance beneath,” she writes. “The poor, the unfortunate, have been put through the sieve and stand nakedly for what they are.”¹² To gain perspective one must first recognize what blinds us.

In “Who Owns Cross Creek?” Rawlings speaks of her neighbors in the context of Steinbeck’s writing: “Men who had cultivated their land for generations were dispossessed because banks and industrialists believed they could make a greater profit by turning over the soil to mass, mechanized production. But what will happen to that land when the industrialists themselves are gone? The earth will survive bankers and any system of government, capitalistic, fascist or bolshevist. The earth will even survive anarchy.”¹³ How prophetic her words ring today. One might argue that she is herself a Steinbeck of rural Florida—able to look, with humility and compassion, and see her fellow backwoodsmen as individuals, each a jumbled bag of contradictions.

Rawlings, however, trumps Steinbeck as a more subtle and lyrical stylist, and elegant philosopher. She believes those “who are least positive are closest to the truth. We know only that as human beings we are very stupid and that somewhere beyond us are forces unintelligibly wiser or cleverer or more fixed than we. The forces may concern themselves with us or they may not, but it seems to me, and seemed to the Widow Slater, that people live or die, thrive or pine, quite beyond human reason.”¹⁴

In places, her mediations are a poignant forebear to Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek; more measured, less ecstatic, but no less resounding. “A knowledge brushed me as briefly as though a bird had flown past me from the tree,” Rawlings writes. “Lives are only one with living. How dare we, in our egos, claim catastrophe in the rise and fall of the individual entity? There is only Life, and we are beads strung on its strong and endless thread.”¹⁵ After staying up all night during a freeze, lighting fires throughout her orange grove along with her workmen and neighbors, fighting to save the crop—one of the most harrowing and evocative passages in the book—she writes, “I thought, ‘How can any of us be cruel to one another? How are wars possible, and hate, when we must all face such things? Death is the enemy, and life itself is inimical, for all its bounty. We must hold one another close against the cosmic perils.”¹⁶

In gazing with the head and the heart, Rawlings vividly captures portraits of ordinary people undertaking what may be described as the most ordinary of tasks. But she reminds us how the ordinary opens the door to the great questions—how our existence is interdependent with the laws of nature and the metaphysical. In a 21st-century culture in which we have forgotten how to live meaningfully, Cross Creek offers a portrait, in time-capsule, of the way home.

“It’s a … blessing for us not many Yankees have seen country like this, or they’d move in on us worse than Sherman,” Rawlings’s friend Zelma says in Cross Creek.¹⁷ The two women are out taking the census on horseback. Later, Zelma says, “The b…s killed the egrets for their plumage until the egrets gave out. They killed alligators for their hides until the alligators gave out. If the frogs ever give out, the sons of b…s will starve to death.”¹⁸ Here, Zelma is specifically referring to the rural population depending on frogs for their survival, but the ramification of her words is hauntingly prescient. In 2021, amphibians are in severe decline worldwide due to toxic chemicals, diseases, and habitat destruction, as the sixth mass extinction gathers momentum. And Florida, with over twenty million inhabitants, now surpasses New York as the third most populated within the United States.

A subtle but no less surprising aspect of reading Rawlings’s writing today is piecing together, from her keen observations, just how much of our native ecology we have lost, and how much seasonality and climate have changed. In many ways, the extinction of large mammals by humans has been underway for thousands of years; Florida’s Neolithic ancestors helped to drive the megafauna—the mastodons, mammoths, and sabre-tooth tigers whose remains lie at the bottom of freshwater springs—to perish long ago. Remarkably, literature can serve as a quietly unbiased time-marker for ecological and climate accounts. The Florida panther was already well on its way to disappearing from Rawlings’s region of North-central Florida by the 1930s, and encounters are few and far between. “I have heard the sound twice, once above the Ocklawaha River and once in the wilds of Gulf hammock near the Suwannee River,” Rawlings writes of the big cat’s legendary scream. “Soon after the last panther in the Big Scrub disappeared.”¹⁹

Rawlings was a hunter, as were many who lived in her remote region, albeit a conscientious one. Of the limpkin, a wading bird, she says, “I shot another while I was there, and then I heard of their vanishing history, and would not shoot another.”²⁰

In Cross Creek, she devotes essays to each season: “Spring at the Creek,” “Summer,” “Fall,” and “Winter.” Hardly a paragraph goes by that doesn’t illustrate how much has changed from then to now, and strikingly so. “First strong sun of spring, in February or early March, struck into the ground,” she begins.²¹ For the last several years, Florida has broken records and endured temperatures in January and February that are two months ahead of schedule—especially warmer, humid nights. Rawlings’s statement, “At the Creek, spring is as definite and as exciting as in Greenland,” to a Floridian today, sounds as if she is describing another planet; winter has become spring, and spring has warped into summer in heat and intensity.²² One wonders how the flora and fauna are coping, and will continue to cope, when both rely on such precise conditions to flourish: “The iris knows what it wants in the way of April weather and waits for precisely the acceptable conjunction of rain and warmth.”²³

Her accounts of “Summer” are just as alarmingly different. “Our summer temperatures are seldom extreme, never reaching the 100’s and above as elsewhere in the country,” she writes.²⁴ In June, 2018, central Florida reached temperatures in the high nineties with heat indexes reaching 103F. Also, “We have little advance news of summer. One day it is spring, with the air cool and the buds still opening. The next, it is summer….”²⁵ Buds now open during the heat waves of winter—and at above 80F, why shouldn’t they?—the flora clearly confused.

Most disturbing of all may be Rawlings’s accounts of the precipitation patterns. In “Summer,” she states, “The rains last usually until mid-August”; today’s rains last well into September.²⁶ In describing the summer showers, she says, “Sometimes it is a gentle shower, sometimes a rushing flood. After it has passed, the air is as fresh and clean as April and the night will be cool for sleeping.”²⁷ Gentle showers are nearly nonexistent in present-day Florida; the summer deluge, more monsoon-like with each passing year, dominates. The air does not cool off, but hangs in a hot, pea-soup-like blanket, all day and throughout the night. Moreover, the April air is no longer cool enough to even make comparison. For those who have lived in Florida for decades, the experience is akin to sliding into an eternal tropical summer.

Throughout the book, Rawlings describes an abundance of wildlife: blue jays, West Indian ground doves, lizards, insects, and more—the sheer numbers of which no longer exist, due to the urban/suburban invasion and over- development. Reading these essays, the tone of which brims with enthusiasm and awe for the native ecology, is revelatory—one emerges feeling wonder and gratitude, and also a shattering heartbreak. The ending, “Who Owns Cross Creek?” is rendered in Rawlings’s distinctly vivid and lyrical prose that the reader has come to know so well, along with the inhabitants and place. “And after I am dead… a long line of red-birds and whippoorwills and blue-jays and ground doves, will descend,”²⁸ she writes. In her poetic vision that follows, the native birds and creatures reclaim the land.

Only the songbirds will not, for their populations have been decimated.

Rawlings is justified in declaring the animals have more claim to this earth than we do. But she was unable to foresee the massive migration to what was for so long regarded an undesirable backwater. The Yankees did come, yes, but so did people from all over the world who have made Florida their home. The overdevelopment that would bring the fragile peninsula from one of the least populated states to the most populated in recent years, a sprawling mecca of vacation- and second-homes. She did not foresee, could not foresee, the sixth mass extinction of life on earth, along with the toxic polluted waterways, the lethal red tides, the destruction of wetlands and hammocks. She did not foresee the acidification of oceans and phytoplankton decline, deforestation of the world’s most precious places, the Amazon and old-growth forests, plastic-filled oceans, and aquifers running dry. She did not foresee the melting of the polar ice, the havoc of disintegrating jet streams, and too many wildfires to put out.

Unless, unbeknownst even to her, she did see, several generations to come, our fateful day of reckoning—as evident by the very question with which she ends the book.

      Who owns Cross Creek?

      Who owns Florida?

      Who owns Earth?

Small comfort, perhaps, that her courageous return to wildness, to enchantment, brings us a few precious insights, speaking to us, in our collapsing world, through the sands of time. “This holy harmony is the ideal,” she writes, “but it does not take into account the dual nature of man and the dual nature of the universe. All life is a balance, when it is not a battle, between the forces of creation and the forces of destruction, between love and hate, between life and death. Perhaps it is impossible ever to say where one ends and the other begins, for even creation and destruction are relative.”²⁹

Perhaps all of our endings are embedded in beginnings, the creation and destruction inextricably linked, unfolding together, simultaneously.

Indeed. For one is left wondering how much the rampant success of her own stories may have reshaped Florida in the countless imaginations of the multitudes who would later seek to retire or remake themselves here. Her novel The Yearling was selected for the Book-of-the-Month Club in 1938, and it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1939. MGM released the film version in 1946. When Rawlings published Cross Creek in 1942, that book was also chosen for the Book-of-the-Month Club. Moreover, the latter was released in a special armed forces edition, sent to hundreds of thousands of servicemen during World War II. How many who read those two beloved books in their youth decided that one day, they too would seek out the magic of Florida? Generations later, I did.

Rawlings bequeathed most of her property to the University of Florida, Gainesville, where she taught creative writing, and her land at Cross Creek is now the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Historic State Park. The Yearling and Cross Creek, among her many other literary works, have been made into major motion pictures and translated into twenty-two languages.

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Vanessa Blakeslee teaches at Goddard College, and she is the author of three acclaimed books of literary fiction, Train Shots, Juventud, and most recently, Perfect Conditions, winner of the Foreword Reviews 2018 INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award for Short Stories (Gold). She serves on the Board of Directors for the Jack Kerouac Writers-in-Residence Project of Orlando. www.vanessablakeslee.com.

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Notes