by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, 1942
This is the memoir by the author of The Yearling. She tells about her 13 years living in Florida on 72 acres in the northeastern part of the state near the St. John’s River between Jacksonville and St. Augustine. Her home is a Florida state park now in Hawthorne, Florida. She began living there in 1928. The book is filled with fascinating descriptions of the land, the people, the food, the birds, animals, trees, rivers, lakes, crops. What a beautiful book! Life there was hard but she loved it. Several chapters tell of her struggle to find good help, and these are the only down-side in that they reflect the attitudes and treatment of blacks in the 1930’s. Marjorie needed a personal maid to help her in the house and a “grove man” to help her with all the chores outside, basically running a small farm (milking a cow twice a day, pigs, chickens, orange groves, weeding, farming, etc.) At one point, she pays a father $5 for his young daughter in hopes she can raise her up to be the perfect personal maid:
I bought Georgia of her father for five dollars. The surest way to keep a maid at the Creek, my new friends told me, was to take over a very young Negro girl and train her in my ways. She should be preferably without home ties so that she should become attached to me. My friends traced a newly widowered father of a large family that he was unable to feed as a unit. He was happy to “give” me Georgia, with no strings attached. A five-dollar-bill sealed the bargain. Two months of life with her made me wonder why he had not given her to the first passing gypsy caravan, or drowned her decently.
Pretty shocking and painful to read! She tells it like it was and it shows how far we’ve come and how far we’ve yet to go. Once, a white man and his wife (Lum and Ida) tried to do the work. Ida ended up being a wonderful personal maid but Lum wasn’t willing to work so hard and quit and took her away:
The job was an appalling blow to Lum. To keep up with the routine winter work meant from eight to ten full hours a day. He could not believe it.
This quote is when she decides to go on a rattlesnake hunt in the Everglades:
At the moment I was passing through one of those periods of emotional distress that all of us experience, when some personal catastrophe has tumbled our house of cards about our ears. My small world had crumbled.
She describes how she makes crab Newburg:
It is impossible to give proportions, for I never twice have the same amount of crab meat to work with, and here indeed I have no mother, but only instinct, to guide me. In an iron skillet over a low fire I place a certain amount of Dora’s butter. As it melts, I stir in the flaked crab meat, lightly, tenderly. The flakes must not become disintegrated; they must not brown. I add lemon juice, possibly a tablespoonful for each cup of crab meat. I add salt and pepper frugally, paprika more generously, and a dash of powdered clove so temporal that the flavor in the finished Newburg is only as though the mixture has been whisked through a spice grove. I add Dora’s golden cream. I do not know the exact quantity. It must be generous, but the delicate crab meat must never become deluged with any other element.The mixture bubbles for a few moments. I stir in dry sherry, the quantity again unestimable. Something must be left to genius. I stir in well beaten eggs, perhaps an egg, perhaps two, for every cup of flakes.The mixture must now no more than be turned over on itself and removed in a great sweep from the fire. I stir in a tablespoonful, or two, of the finest brandy, and turn the Newburg into a piping hot covered serving dish. I serve it on toast points and garnish superfluously with parsley, and a Chablis or white Rhine wine is recommended as an accompaniment. Angels sing softly in the distance.
In her chapter, “Spring at the Creek:”
There is a beauty of the strange and a beauty of the familiar. The traveller to far places is enchanted because what he sees is new. If he found himself obliged to live forever in some quaint hamlet, the picturesqueness that intrigued him with its novelty would be likely to become his prison. The test of beauty is whether it can survive close knowledge. The dancer, dazzling behind the footlights, may in ordinary living be so dull, so unkind, so fractious, that her smooth limbs and lovely face are lost in the immediacy of her spiritual unloveliness. On the other hand, a very plain woman or an ugly man may receive a deep devotion, because the known qualities of mind and spirit are beautiful, and this familiar beauty lies like a soft veil over any physical inadequacies.
She befriends a work-dog down the road during a period of loneliness and has to break off their friendship when she gets a puppy of her own. It’s absolutely heartbreaking:
Some weeks after we began our jaunts together I was given the high-bred pointer puppy for which I had been waiting. The puppy was captivating. I devoted myself at once to his care and training. I wanted to raise the handsome young fellow as a companion, so that I was especially anxious to discipline him firmly from the beginning. I ended my evening walks down the highway, going about the grove instead. The puppy was not yet broken to go to heel and I could not risk the distraction of the catch-dog, a rabbit chaser, to disturb his training. Two or three days later the yellow dog came to my gate, wagging his tail, I ignored him and he went away.
A week later I took my young pointer on a leash. We passed the entrance to Cow Hammock. Passing, the catch-dog must have scented us, for some distance on he came after us on the gallop. He was insane with joy. He jumped against me, he went taut proudly, introducing himself to the puppy. He dropped his forelegs to the ground and shook his head, inviting the new dog to play. The puppy barked shrilly and tugged at the leash. Discipline was hopeless. There was nothing for it but to drive the catch-dog away. I made a menacing gesture. He looked at me unbelieving and did not stir. I picked up a handful of light gravel and threw it in his direction and went on, dragging the puppy behind me. The catch-dog followed. He watched with bewildered eyes.
I shouted with as much as I could manage to bring from a sick heart, “Get back!” and he stopped and made no further effort to go with us. On the way home, we passed him, lying at the Cow Hammock entrance, his head on his paws. He fluttered his tail a little, as though in hope that I did not, could not, mean my rejection of him. The pointer and I hurried by.
Now we pass as though we were strangers. I am ashamed to face him, having used him in my loneliness, and then betrayed him. He shows no signs of recognition. His tail curves over his back. He trots with a high head, looking straight ahead. He is a work dog, and he must be about his business.
Describing the snow that came one winter:
The snow at the Creek came on a cloudy winter evening when the temperature hung at the minutest fraction below thirty-two degrees. It was a fine, dry, powdery snow, like a wandering breath of the north. Inits brief falling it sifted through cracks and eaves and lay for a moment like spilled salt. It was surprising that so nebulous a thing should make an entrance anywhere.
“Snow’s a searchin’ thing,” Martha said. “Snow be like sorrow. It searches people out.”
When she describes the lighting of fires in the orange grove in order to keep the oranges from freezing whenever temperatures go below 28 degrees:
I have seen no more beautiful thing in my life than my orange grove by night, lighted by fatwood fires. It is doubly beautiful for the danger and the struggle, like a beloved friend for whose life one battles, drinking in the well known features that may be taken away forever.
When her mule, Old Joe, is dying:
“I said, “I hate to keep you up late this way, Snow.”
“That’s plumb all right. He’s likely to have a wild fit at the end and hurt hisself. I reckon the dyin’ itself won’t hurt. I’d hate to leave him alone. He’s been mighty faithful.”
Glenwood said, “Shore has been faithful.”
Toward midnight I brought the boys ham and bread and coffee, and the occasion in the bright cold moonlight was not at all a sad one. All creatures must die and old Joe had had a good life, as life goes for a mule, and not too hard a one, and how he had companionship at the end. He came to the fence and whinnied and I touched his nose. Then he broke into a gallop and when he was done with that fine burst of living, he was done with it for good.
When her neighbor, Old Boss, has a sick wife:
Old Miss was very ill, Martha told me and I went down to Old Boss’ house to inquire of her. He came to the door in answer to my question. His face wore its usual mask, kindly and detached.
“She’s not doing well,” he said. “I’m afraid–I’ll lose her.”
I put out my hand to touch him. The next moment he had reached out his arms to me, and Old Boss was crying on my shoulder. I held his small body close to me and was astonished by its frailty. He was not now the giver of laws, but a lonely little old man weeping for his beloved. I knew in that instant how fragile a defense are pride and authority against the common enemies.
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.”
During another dark period, a friend takes her on a river trip down the St. John’s River:
Once I lost touch with the Creek. I had had hardships that seemed to me more than one could bear alone. I loved the Creek, I loved the grove, I loved the shabby farmhouse. Suddenly they were nothing. The difficulties were greater than the compensations. I talked morosely with my friend Dessie. I do not think she understood my torment, for she is simple and direct and completely adjusted to all living. She knew only that a friend was in trouble.
She said, “We’ll take one of those river trips we’ve talked about. We’ll take that eighteen-foot boat of yours with a couple of outboard motors and put in at the head of the St. John’s River. We’ll go down the river for several hundred miles.”
I agreed, for the Creek was torture.
Near the end of the book in the chapter, “Who Owns Cross Creek?”
We only know that we are impelled to fight on the side of the creative forces. We know only that a sense of well-being sweeps over us when we have assisted life rather than destroyed it. There is often an evil satisfaction in hate, satisfaction in revenge, and satisfaction in killing. Yet when a wave of love takes over a human being, love of another human being, love of nature, love of all mankind, love of the universe, such an exaltation takes him that he knows he has put his finger on the pulse of the great secret and the great answer.
Her last sentence:
Cross Creek belongs to the wind and the rain, to the sun and the seasons, to the cosmic secrecy of seed, and beyond all, to time.
Loved this book!