Crossing the Creek: The Literary Friendship of Zora Neale Hurston and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

1. "Friendship is a mysterious and ocean-bottom thing": The Hurston-Rawlings Friendship

and ocean-bottom thing” The Hurston-Rawlings Friendship Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings first acknowledged Zora Neale Hurston’s existence a few years before they met, as early as 1939. Rawlings had been reading Hurston’s books, and she mentions her name in a lecture titled “Regional Literature of the South” that she delivered at the annual luncheon of the National Council of Teachers of English in New York on 25 November 1939 (the essay was later published in College English and English Journal in February 1940). In the article, Rawlings disparages the term “regionalist,” believing that regional writers’ “ultimate artistry is inadequate for a claim to the creation of literature” (278). She may have been self-serving, because at the time she was sometimes dismissed as a “regionalist” and resented all the limitations and gender discrimination that the term implied. Rawlings ends her lecture by considering the novels of three recently published southern female writers —Julia Peterkin, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, and “the negress, Zora Neale Hurston”—and claiming that their books “seem to me very close “Friendship is a mysterious 1 The Hurston-Rawlings Friendship 15 to literature.” Nevertheless, she delivers a disclaimer: “Yet, again, permanence , or relative permanence, is too difficult for me to gauge” (277). Regarding Hurston’s work, she explains: “It is the newest book by Zora Neale Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain, that tempts me to admit her to my own private library of literature. The book is reminiscent of Thomas Mann’s great Joseph in Egypt. A timeless legend, part of man’s priceless literary and spiritual heritage, is here revivified through the luminous negro mind. The book is racial, rather than regional, and I had best avoid a positive judgment on the excuse of irrelevancy to my subject matter” (278). Rawlings’s judgment that Hurston’s book can be categorized as “racial ” marginalizes it just as much as if she called it “regional.” The fact that Rawlings mentions race at all indicates that it is at the back of her mind when she initially regards Hurston and her work. Rawlings further distances herself from Hurston’s work by claiming that they do not share the same subject matter. Yet she seems attracted to the vitality of Hurston ’s “luminous negro mind.” After this initial awareness of Hurston as a writer, there is a question concerning when Rawlings actually met Hurston. Judging from Rawlings ’s letters to her husband and friends, their first meeting most likely occurred when Hurston invited Rawlings to speak at Florida Normal and Industrial College, a black school in St. Augustine, on 5 July 1942. Rawlings then reciprocated by inviting Hurston to tea at her hotel, the Castle Warden, the next day. However, Rawlings’s longtime African American servant Idella Parker—the author of the memoir Idella: Marjorie Rawlings’ “Perfect Maid”—claims that the two authors became acquainted as early as the fall of 1940. Parker recounts that she came to work for Rawlings in September 1940 and that Hurston showed up for a visit shortly thereafter . Parker believes that the two authors had met previously at Rollins College, “where they both went from time to time to speak to groups of students” (86). Hurston’s hometown of Eatonville is located only a few miles from the campus in Winter Park, and Hurston often visited faculty members there in pursuit of her dramatic and literary projects; thus she may have met Rawlings on one of these visits. Unfortunately, there is no verification in letters or newspaper accounts that they at- Crossing the Creek 16 tended or spoke at the same event. Rawlings, who received an honorary doctorate from Rollins in 1939, frequently visited the campus as the honored guest of its president, Hamilton Holt, and participated in the Animated Magazine, a festival of distinguished speakers who publicly discussed their work in front of large audiences (see Reich). Hurston was not on the program with Rawlings on any of the dates that Rawlings spoke, nor was she likely in the predominantly white audience listening to Rawlings. According to St. Augustine historian David Nolan, a more likely initial meeting may have occurred in St. Augustine through both writers’ friendship with Mary Holland, the wife of Spessard Holland, Florida’s twenty-eighth governor, who served from 1941 to 1945 (Nolan interview). Rawlings shared the platform with Governor Holland during the 1941 Animated Magazine at Rollins and became a friend of his wife...