Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings: A Mountain Passage

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings: A Mountain Passage by Louis D. Silveri 14 Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings is almost exclusively identified with the Florida that meant so much to her and her literary endeavors. But she had interesting relationships with people and places in the mountains, wrote some fiction set in the mountains, and believed there was a close kinship between the Florida "crackers" she wrote about and the people of the southern highlands . Mrs. Rawlings was the author of the Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Yearling , three other novels, many short stories, and a masterful non-fictional evocation of time and place called Cross Creek. Most of this literary production was spread over the years 1930 to 1953 with the bulk of it concentrated in the first fifteen years. Marjorie was born in Washington, D.C, on August 8, 1896.' After the death of her father, an attorney with the U.S. Patent Office, the family moved to Wisconsin where, in 1918, she graduated from the University of Wisconsin as a Phi Beta Kappa English major. After her marriage to Charles Rawlings, she wrote feature articles for the Louisville Courier-Journal and the Rochester, New York Journal-American from 1920 to 1928. She also wrote several pieces of short fiction which no publisher accepted . Her husband, a journalist, had become equally frustrated in his literary efforts. In March, 1928, they decided to take a vacation in Florida where Charles' two brothers were living. Two days out of New York on a cruise ship, they entered the St. Johns River and docked at Jacksonville. Boarding a smaller boat, they cruised south through a subtropical world which Marjorie instantly realized would have a profound influence on her future.2 After two weeks of sightseeing, fishing, and hunting through the Ocala Scrub country, Charles and Marjorie commissioned the Rawlings' brothers to find a place for them where they could make a living until their writing bore fruit. Before the year was out they were settled on a seventy acre orange grove with farmhouse and assorted buildings in a place called Cross Creek. This tiny hamlet was four miles from the nearest paved road, between two huge but shallow lakes, surrounded by jungle-like tangled masses of swampland, hammock , prairie, and low-lying trees and bushes. Isolated as it was, Cross Creek is only about sixty miles from both the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. Jacksonville is seventy miles away, and the college town of Gainesville only 20 miles distant. A remarkable relationship of person and place developed from the moment Marjorie saw Cross Creek. Nature had endowed the locale with flora and fauna she found captivating. And God had placed in this "frontier eden" people the likes of which she had never Known. Despite the hard work involved in operating the orange grove, Marjorie found time to observe her surroundings. The more she got to know her cracker neighbors the more she realized she was witnessing the America of a hundred years ago, and she could hardly write fast enough to record what she saw and heard before change took place. By 1931 Scribner's Magazine had accepted and published three of her short stories. A mixture of fact and fiction about the local crackers, the stories elicited an angry reaction from the editor of the Ocala Star. "No one in Florida acted or spoke the way she had portrayed them; she must have gotten her knowledge of southern poor whites from visiting the Cumberland mountains," he wrote. Marjorie answered the editor: "My sketches are so true that I have softened, not colored them, for fear that if they came to the chance attention of the subjects—all within a forty mile radius of my home—offense would be taken at my frankness ... I have only begun my re-creation of this section and these people . . . there must be longer and further prowlings through the piney woods and the shadowy hammocks— 15 where, alas, my dear sir, I am never likely to meet you."3 She had never visited the Cumberland Mountains. Marjorie did believe that cracker speech "is a certain sign of the isolation of the Florida interior ... It is grammatical as...