The road was dusty and the land was poor, but when she came to that lonely spot in the forgotten heart of Florida, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings knew she had at last found home.
For 25 years she hung on, a city woman discovering a new world in the country. With plain, sweaty work she built a solid life for herself, and with her own rare gift she enriched the world.
She died nearly 40 years ago, yet Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, a Pulitzer Prize winner, still may be Florida’s finest writer. No one is better at showing how the character of people can be shaped by the spirit of place.
And none of it would have been possible had she not come to this hard little scrap of land called Cross Creek. She first saw it in 1928, when Florida was a wild and distant place. Passenger ships still ran between Jacksonville and New York. Cattle roamed across open range, backwoods children rarely saw a school, and men fired their stills to make white liquor by the shine of the moon.
And maybe because she was seeking someplace special, a place she could make hers alone, she saw it with the keen appreciation of the outsider, the fresh eye of enchantment.
“Any grove or any wood is a fine thing to see,” she wrote in “Cross Creek” in 1942. “But the magic here, strangely, is not apparent from the road. It is necessary to leave the impersonal highway, to step inside the rusty gate and close it behind. . . . One is now inside the grove, out of one world and in the mysterious heart of another. . . . And after long years of spiritual homelessness, of nostalgia, here is that. Here is home.”
Marjorie Rawlings married twice, had many friends and made a powerful impression on everyone who met her. Yet it is no exaggeration to say that the one great love of her life was Cross Creek.
For 22 years her small white frame house and the surrounding grounds have been kept up for visitors. Citrus trees were planted to re-create the appearance and the sweet scent that Rawlings knew. A new barn was built, just like the one there before. Someone donated a cream-colored 1940 Oldsmobile like the one she used to drive.
The Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings State Historic Site is the most vivid example in Florida of how a celebrated writer lived and worked in her own environment. It is the world Marjorie Rawlings created for herself.
The 1983 movie “Cross Creek,” with Mary Steenburgen as Rawlings, was filmed here. It is the only Florida state park honoring the life and work of an author.
To come to Marjorie Rawlings’ house takes effort. It is midway between Ocala and Gainesville, in southern Alachua County, and is not on the way to anywhere else.
Last year 30,000 people visited the house, plus 4,000 schoolchildren. In December the Rawlings house came within three weeks of being closed indefinitely because of cutbacks in the state budget. After protests at the state capitol, the Department of Natural Resources reversed its plans to shut down several state parks, and the Rawlings house will remain open, though with a smaller staff.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was a forceful, independent woman who came to Florida to find solitude and inspiration. She believed that happiness depended on place. Only when she discovered Cross Creek at age 32 did she find harmony with her surroundings.
Marjorie Kinnan was born in Washington, D.C., in 1896, graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Wisconsin in 1918, married a classmate, Charles Rawlings, and embarked on a career in journalism.
She worked in New York City, Louisville, and Rochester, N.Y., before she and her husband came to Florida in 1928 to visit two of his brothers.
With an inheritance, Marjorie Rawlings bought 72 acres of land, and she and her husband left the urban North for a life of orange groves, farm work and eccentric backwoods neighbors.
Charles Rawlings’ tastes ran more toward yachts and country clubs, and by 1933 he and Marjorie were divorced. She stayed on alone to keep her little farm going and to write of the new world she had found. She wrote nine books, all but one of which were set in Florida. Her best-known book is “The Yearling,” which was published in 1938 and made Rawlings a celebrity.
The novel about a boy on the Florida frontier and his pet deer became an instant best seller and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1939. The movie rights sold for $30,000, the equivalent of perhaps $500,000 today, and the 1946 film starring Gregory Peck and Jane Wyman was one of the first Hollywood movies shot on location. Her finest book may not be the sentimental “Yearling,” but her non-fiction “Cross Creek,” a best seller in 1942. It is a lyrical yet straightforward account of the land and people she came to know.
Rawlings was a formidable woman in almost every way. She was 5 feet 7, weighed 180 and had dark hair and gray-blue eyes. She was a chain smoker and a heavy drinker, a brilliant cook, a loyal and generous friend.
There still are people who recall Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and the strong presence she cast.
Idella Thompson Parker, praised as “the perfect maid” in “Cross Creek,” has just written a book about her life with Rawlings.
“I know more about Marjorie Rawlings than anybody in the world,” says Parker, who is 78 and lives in Ocala.
She worked with Rawlings from 1940 to 1950, the time of the author’s greatest fame and frustration. Parker was with her for her marriage to Norton Baskin in 1941 and for the filming of “The Yearling.”
They were as close as it was possible for employer and maid, white and black, to be in the 1940s.
Florida was still very much a Southern state in the 1940s, and in her book, Idella Parker recalls an anxious afternoon at an Ocala movie theater. Blacks were not allowed before 6 p.m. and then could sit only in the balcony. When the managers refused to let Parker enter one day, Rawlings cursed them loudly and marched Parker into the theater with her.
“She let those men have an earful of some strong language,” Parker writes in her book, “Idella: Marjorie Rawlings’ `Perfect Maid,”‘ (University Press of Florida, $12.95). “My, that woman could cuss. They were struck dumb.”
Still, she could be insensitive and condescending. She often used the words “nigger” and “darky.”
“She was nice,” Parker recalls. “She was a joy to be around at times. But she was still a white lady.”
In 1935 Rawlings broke her neck and skull when she was thrown from a horse. She had several car wrecks and had many nagging health problems, the most serious of which was diverticulosis, an intestinal disorder that required surgery and several hospital stays.
And as the years went by she grew more attached to the bottle.
“When it started, I can’t say exactly,” Idella Parker writes in her book, “Idella,” “but I began to notice that she was . . . placing a bottle of whiskey, wrapped in a paper bag, right alongside the typewriter.”
Even at the end-she died after a stroke in 1953 at age 57-the “shabby old lovely place,” as she once called Cross Creek, was still home. It was the place where her spirit could rest. She is buried in Antioch Cemetery in Island Grove, 4 miles from her farm.
“We need above all, I think, a certain remoteness from urban confusion,” Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings wrote in “Cross Creek,” “and while this can be found in other places, Cross Creek offers it with such beauty and grace that once entangled with it, no other place seems possible. . .”
