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

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments Many people have supported and encouraged my work on this project. I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to librarians, students, friends, fellow scholars, and family for their generosity through the years I was writing this book. First and foremost, I want to thank my family. My husband, George Everett, has been with me every step of the way, always providing optimism , good cheer, and all sorts of tangible and intangible support. My sons, Christopher and Andrew, are the lights of my life. Their love of nature has opened up facets of Florida hidden from my view. Together we have boated through the Everglades, collected sand dollars in Naples, hunted horseshoe crabs on Pine Island, swum at New Smyrna Beach, gone hawking in central Florida, and watched shuttle launches at Cape Kennedy. I never would have understood Hurston’s and Rawlings’s settings without these experiences. I was first introduced to the work of Zora Neale Hurston by my friend Steve Glassman, a professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, who invited me to present a paper at his “Zora” conference in 1989. I had never heard of Hurston and did not have time to read all of her Acknowledgments xii works, but I came up with an idea that opened up Hurston’s world in ways I never could have imagined. I interviewed most of the people in Eatonville who had known her. I will always be grateful to Mrs. Mattie Jones, Mrs. Annie Davis, Mrs. Hoyt Davis, Mrs. Jimmie Lee Harrell, Mrs. Harriet Moseley, and Mrs. Clara Williams for inviting me into their homes and shining the inside light on their remarkable community. I thoroughly enjoyed getting to know these women and am grateful for the ways in which they made Hurston come alive for me. After these personal interviews awakened my keen interest in Hurston ’s work, I benefited greatly from illuminating conversations with many valued colleagues. I am especially grateful to Maurice “Socky” O’Sullivan, a professor at Rollins College, for his mentorship, friendship , and wry sense of humor over the past twenty-plus years. He has always been my leading expert on Florida writers. I also want to thank Barbara Speisman, a professor at Florida A&M University, for generously sharing ideas and theories on Hurston’s life and works and for giving me a fascinating tour of Notasulga, Alabama, and the Old South. I’ve also learned so much from the brilliant scholarship of Cheryl Wall, John Lowe, Robert Hemenway, and Carla Kaplan, and I have enormously enjoyed my conversations with them about Hurston. I owe Barbara Speisman a second debt of gratitude for introducing me to the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Society. I have been executive director of this group since 2005. I cannot express in words how special this group has been to me. Over the years, we’ve traveled together to Banner Elk, North Carolina (where Rawlings wrote The Yearling), Cross Creek, Cedar Key, and the scrub area around Salt Springs, Florida. I’m especially grateful to the society’s thirty-six trustees, with whom I meet four times a year. They are dedicated to keeping the memory of Rawlings ’s life, works, and legacy alive. Among the trustees, historian David Nolan of St. Augustine has taken a particular interest in this book. As a friend of Norton Baskin, a historian of St. Augustine, David has provided guidance, direction, and insight. I’ve also valued the contributions of other trustees who were acquainted with Rawlings, including Philip May Jr. of Jacksonville, whose father defended Rawlings in her famous “invasion of privacy” trial; Idella Parker, who was Rawlings’s servant at Cross Creek and wrote Idella: Marjorie Rawlings’ “Perfect Maid”; and Acknowledgments xiii Ernest Bass, a pastor at St. Simon’s Island, Georgia, who knew Rawlings when he was a child at Cross Creek. All of these friends have enriched my knowledge of Rawlings’s life and works. I have been fortunate to serve the society with a remarkable list of presidents, including Marsha Phelts, a librarian at the Florida Genealogy Department of the Jacksonville Public Library; William H. Jeter, an attorney from Drayton Island , Florida; Robert Davis from Indialantic, Florida; and Brent Kinser, a professor at Western Carolina University. Brent Kinser, my coeditor of The Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Journal of Florida Literature, has been a source of joy and laughter as we have labored over journal issues and society conferences. I appreciate...