Cross Creek

Cross Creek is a wonderful vignette look into early 20th Century life in "Old Florida". The book is different in style from Rawlings well known work, The Yearling. The Yearling tells a tender story of a boy coming of age during the depression era in Florida; Cross Creek is a sketch of the characters that live in this little wetland community of Florida.

If you like slow-moving books with lots of detail, excellent characterization and great choice of words, this book is for you. If you're looking for edge-of-your seat plot then head for the fiction section. I placed it on my shelf for favorite books.

Her perception of the beauty in nature is breathtaking, but unfortunately her racism is blatant. Can't blame this on ignorance either. She's writing about her neighbors and people who lived with her. Hard to understand how both worldviews fit into one woman. I wasn't able to finish. The book made me very sad.

Cross Creek is one of the finest memoirs ever written, filled with grace and beauty from one of America's greatest writers, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. Perhaps no other writer has so perfectly and honestly captured a place and time like Rawlings did in Cross Creek. It will transport you to that small acreage of backwoods Florida and cause you to wish for a life such as this.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings purchased a seventy-two acre orange grove in this remote area and fled her aristocratic life in the city to perfect her craft and get published. It is here all her beloved books would be born, including this memoir covering the years of hardships and beauty at the creek. Rawlings herself would become a part of the earth and land as she was reborn here in Cross Creek and would leave behind literary achievements such as "South Moon Under," "Golden Apples," "When the Whipporwill," "Cross Creek Cookery," and of course, her Pulitzer winning, "The Yearling."

Her close relationships with her neighbors at the creek, both black and white, are told with humor and humanity. Their lives were often filled with hardships but serenity as well, for all of them had chosen to live this kind of life rather than conform to society. Especially poignant are Rawlings' observations of a young destitute couple who would be portrayed so movingly in Jacob's Ladder.

Rawlings' recollections of her friendship with Moe, and especially his daughter Mary, who was Moe's reason for living and the only one in his family who cared when he came or went, are told with such beauty we feel pain ourselves when he takes his last breath at the creek. Her deep friendships over the years with Tom and Old Martha are told with humor, honesty and a gift for description few have ever had.

Tinged with sadness is Marjorie's relationship both as employer and friend to 'Geechee. Rawlings would attempt to help her to no avail as this sweet personality slowly became an unemployable alcoholic. Her mistreatment at the hands of a womanizer unworthy of her love was at the heart of her problem. It is perhaps at the bottom of a few bitter comments from Rawlings.

But Cross Creek is about the earth and our relationship to it. When we stray from it we become less because it is a part of us. Rawlings came to believe over time that when we lose this connection to the earth, we lose a part of ourselves. The great and wondrous beauty of nature, from magnolia blossoms and rare herbs to Hayden mangos and papaya, are as much a part of this memoir as the people. Particularly hilarious are Rawlings' descriptions of a pet racoon of mischievious nature and such cantankerous disposition as to almost seem human.

Rawlings' world at the creek is perhaps her legacy, a gift given to the reader we can never forget. In order to enjoy this memoir, however, one must read the entire book, taking into consideration a number of factors. Published in 1942 and covering many years prior in a backwoods area of Florida, at a time when racial equality was a distant dream, some may be offended by Rawlings' casual, though never mean spirited observations. Rawlings honestly relates actual conversations from this time and place between blacks and whites, and blacks to other blacks. Rawlings treated everyone fairly but a long string of farmhands prone to drink and violence, including the one who would destroy her friend and employee 'Geechee, prompted her to lump an entire race into one group, her friends at the creek being exceptions. I do not feel the comments of this southern woman and most gifted of writers should keep anyone from reading this most beautiful and heartwarming of memoirs.

Rawlings' graceful prose, whether describing a chorus of frogs singing at night as a Brahms waltz, the scent of hibiscus drifting through the air at dusk or a myraid of dishes meticulously prepared and labored over for hours, is delightful and unforgettable. Cross Creek will make you hungry for succulent fruits, cornbread and hot biscuits with wild plum jelly, and the living of life itself.

Reading this lovingly written memoir will leave you with a wistful desire to walk away from society as Rawlings did and live the life we crave in our very being, even if it is not possible, and can only be lived in our hearts.

"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."
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
(1896-1953)

Cross Creek is located just south of Gainesville, Florida, and in spite of the urban sprawl the community is today almost as isolated as it was in 1928, when Marjorie Kennan Rawlings and her first husband Charles Rawlings purchased a farm house and citrus grove in the area. At the time of the purchase, Rawlings was a failed novelist in a bad marriage, and both farm house and grove were neglected. A decade later she was a respected writer on the eve of her most popular novel and happily divorced, and the farm and its citrus groves were very much going concerns.
Rawlings would eventually remarry, and both her second marriage and her literary success would gradually lead her away from both her farm and the Cross Creek community--but she would never leave them entirely, always returning for the inspiration that fed her best works. The property was still in her possession and still in use as both a citrus grove and occasional residence at the time of her sudden death of cerebral hemorrhage in 1953. Rawlings left the it to the University of Florida, and in 1970 the property was turned over to the State of Florida for restoration and management. Restoration was completed in 1996, and while the large citrus grove that once surrounded the farm house has been reduced to a representative portion, visitors can now see the property as it existed in the 1930s and 1940s.
Although Rawlings won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel THE YEARLING and would publish several other novels and short story collections, today her literary reputation rests largely on the book CROSS CREEK, in which she details both her own struggle on the land the lives of the community as she knew it during the 1930s. While the book is clearly autobiographical, it is not autobiography per se; she gives little attention to her personal history, preferring to focus instead on the landscape and the individuals that surround her. The stories she offers are by turns funny, sad, thoughtful, each informed by an intensely felt observation of her environment. And while critics may accuse her of having been excessively sentimental in her fiction, no such sentimentality besets this particular work. It is brilliant from start to finish.
CROSS CREEK was published in 1942, and while it is very much of its era in its depiction of rural society and racial considerations, it also proved very much ahead of its time. It is profoundly concerned with ecology long before the term was popularized, and not only are its characters vividly alive, they move against a landscape that is as alive as they, a landscape that at once harsh and nurturing, at once giving and indifferent, and throughout the text (and most particularly in its final chapter) Rawlings repeatedly takes the point of view that we are not the owners of the earth, but its trustees; its care is in our hands.
I have read CROSS CREEK several times, and I returned to it in the wake of a visit to the Rawlings farm in 2003--and while it is not necessary to actually visit Cross Creek in order to fall in love with this book, they each inform the other. The book is somewhat obscure; the community of Cross Creek is difficult to find on the map and awkward to reach, hardly a place you would stumble upon by accident. It must be reached in deliberation. The guide at the Rawlings farm told me that in spite of this they received some forty thousand visitors from around the world each year--visitors drawn by the power of Rawlings' work and a determination to share in the environment she so loved. That is both testament and recommendation enough.
--GFT (the store Reviewer)--

More than 50 years ago, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings made rural Florida her home and the subject of some of her best writing. Her humor, lyricism and nostalgia are best captured in Cross Creek.
Cross Creek is a book of essays about the life and people in Marjorie's world. Some of her characterizations might not translate in our ethnically-sensitized world and I understand the author was sued by one subject who didn't appreciate her characterization. However, Marjorie's respect and affection for her subjects is apparent in every sentence. Her appreciation for the natural wonders of her world (even insects and reptiles) will refresh the perspective of those who live close to nature and create a longing in those who do not.
Finally, Cross Creek is a glimpse into a long overlooked and vanishing part of the American South. Before the explosion of Orlando, a lot of Florida was rural acreage inhabited by people who lived off the land. Marjorie does not romanticize this existance; one of her wryest essays is about her long-running battle against outdoor plumbing. However, she does show the victories and tragedies of a vanishing people.
Cross Creek is to be read, re-read and loved. I only wish I could discover it all over again, myself.

I loved Cross Creek, with its lush descriptions of central Florida before Disney World turned it into an artificial muddle. Florida already enchants me, and Rawlings put my feelings into words perfectly. I wish that this book had never ended.

My only problem with this book actually comes from the time when it was written. Rawling's most flattering term for Cross Creek's African-American residents is Negro or darky. Other Cross Creek terms are more disturbing. I don't believe that Rawlings was racist, but reading about a "big black buck" raising his voice in a Negro spiritual reminds me how far our society has come since "Cross Creek" was published in 1942.

For any who don't know, Rawlings gained her initial notoriety for the book, The Yearling. Cross Creek is an autobiography of her years spent on 75 acres just below Gainesville which became her retreat for a number of years. This was in the 1940s when much of Florida was still rural. My wife and I own a mobile home in rural Lake City, Florida, but it is not nearly as secluded as Rawling's place. She presents a wonderfully vivid picture of untamed Florida during this period. Surprisingly, the book is not a self-indulgent reflection on her books and how well they sold. She concentrates more upon her natural surroundings and the individuals around her, both friend and foe. If I recommended a memoir by a writer living in rural Florida, you would probably not run out and buy the book. But Rawling's honest transparency and unabashed candor make this a book worth reading.

Rawlings explores the lives and interations of the odd assortment of people living in Cross Creek, Florida in the early 1900s. It is often assigned reading for teens, but I doubt that most of them can appreciate it. Her accounts of neighbors feuding and subsistance living gives us many lessons in human behavior.

The lyrical descriptions of wildlife and the orange groves and wild landscape are very appealing. Your mouth waters as you read her essays on downhome foods like hush puppies. She turned those into a cookbook which I'll have to try out.

Modern readers squirm uncomfortably at her use of the N----- word and her characterization of blacks as irresponsible, drunken, immoral, etc. It is probably a faithful representation of common thinking at the time it was written, so recognize it as a snapshot of the times. Then move past that to luxuriate in the beautiful passages in the book. (I deducted 1 star for this)

The reader becomes absorbed in Rawlings' love of the land and the creation of a home. It gives much the same feelings as A Year in Provence or Under a Tuscan Sun.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Yearling) moves into a cabin in Cross Creek and tells of her life in this tiny community in central Florida around the 1930's.

She makes the change from life in a big city to a life that is simple and yet demanding, quiet yet open to all and full of new,unimagined challenges and conquests.

She uses language of the time. While it would not be considered politically correct, the language does bring the realities of life in rustic Cross Creek into a clearer more tangible experience, abundantly filled with the feel, the taste, and the scents of life in the backcountry.

Her education in the flora and fauna, her tribulations with hired hands, her understanding of those around her are all so vividly told that you feel as if you could have been there watching it all take place before your very eyes.

The insight into the mind and heart of Marjorie Rawlings was both intimate and detached at times. Sometimes she was a delicate piece of the "machinery" driving this backcountry haven and at other times she seemed to feel as if she were but an observer, an outsider, merely watching from a well placed vantage point. This is an intriguing look into the life, the heart and the soul of this beloved classic author.

CULINARY FREAK SHOW!!!!!!!!! Shame on your black yankee heart. I have regularly eaten with gusto most of the recipies that earlier reviwer vilifies. I am a 1947 vintage son of a South Carolina good ol' boy who managed to marry a wonderful New Yawker (actually from the city so nice they named it twice, NY, NY) and convince her to move to the farm in the coastal Low Country which is very similar to central Florida. My Ma couldn't stand the culture shock too long and my parents carried me and my three sisters off to a dairy farm on Long Island in 1956 where I grew up in exile and loss, pining away for swamp country though I still had walking distance access to frequent fishing expeditions at a very nearby beach. My Ma cooked very little game since we did not hunt once we moved north but she was an excellent cook with a German heritage slant to her cooking repertoire. I was raised up there on a more refined cooking style which I have always appreciated but still missed the game dishes of my earlier days. I read this book and others by Rawlings in high school and was prepped with recipies when I headed south after my release from Uncle Sam's SE Asia branch of the School of Hard Knocks. Coming to rest on wild, remote family land in SC (hey, I might be white but I never was particularly poor and I'm surely not trash) I pumped my Aunts for ways to cook fish and game and frequently broke out my copy of this book to supplement my own experimentation with food that had never heard of a grocery store.
The host of pilaus refer to a bunch of pilau (pronounced PER-low here in SC but perhaps more palatable to some when called Pilaf by the ridiculous, effete French) or rice and meat recipies since there are dozens of types of meat (game and grocery store varieties) that are excellent cooked with the rice. I still relish memories of my Aunt Helen's pig tail pilau and her peppery shrimp pilau when I was a child but I could never quite be comfortable with the one she loved which featured CHICKEN FEET in all their scary yellow splendor.
Gopher stew would be a stew made from the now seriously endangered Gopher Tortoise (near extinct in SC) which provided half of the 19th century central Florida survival staple of gophers 'n' grits. I never was wanton enough to kill a Gopher but I have eaten many a snapper, soft shell, cooter or slider turtle as excellent substitutes. Again, these all have excellent (but different) flavor but would probably be readily consumed if served as Terrapin Stew in some trendy eatery.
I've never eaten blackbird pie but have happily consumed countless grackles and redwings in most any other way they could be cooked. My favorite blackbird meal is red wing breasts pot roasted and served with a light brown gravy, rice, mustard greens and lots of hot jalapenos. I've eaten many doves and quail also and I honestly do not find them as succulent as blackbirds gathered from the migratory flocks that feed on the spillage left by the combine in a recently harvested feed corn field when the first cold snap settles in. Man, you couldn't afford to fatten quail or even chickens in a pen with such copious amounts of feed. Yum! You might not have any ethical considerations to killing resident, breeding blackbirds in the warm weather but I've grown up around large stock (remember the dairy farm) and you might question where they get their grain meals in the summer when the fields aren't open and covered with plentiful scattered wasted seed and I would suggest you investigate that source before you enpot a few. Here's a hint, its NOT backyard feeders.
Poke weed (poke salat or poke salad) is Ok but sometimes gives me the runs. I like the super abundant (think weeds) wild mustard better, especially mixed with turnip or collard greens which need to be cultivated or bought. Wild asparagus is small compared to cultivated varieties but a much better flavor and in the right areas (especially the midwest) is not only extraordinarily plentiful but the price is right too. In the north, dandelion leaves provide a tasty potherb.
Never cooked a bear cause they're no longer here on the coast and I have to admit to avoiding coot since I never really enjoyed the other dabblers I ever tried to cook. I couldn't count the squirrels I have eaten and enjoyed after a long afternoon in the woods with my dog and a .22 rifle which made a fun start and tasty end to a great day. I've eaten lots of deer meat but after being in the service, Bambi was a little too high a life form for me to be comfortable hunting (hey, I'm a complex kinda good ol' boy) though smaller and more abundant critters like birds, squirrels, raccoons, turtles and even snakes were never a problem for me to dispatch in pursuit of a meal and fish, crabs and shrimp are seasonally abundant here and made a major part of the diet.
BOTTOM LINE: now that I have you thinking about how good and how different this stuff tastes, hurry up and buy this wonderful book to read while you're trying your hand at cooking Rawling's teriffic recipies and I'll bet the stories and anecdotes will keep you reading while you eat if you have enough hands left to turn the pages.

A delightful read, made much more engaging when combined with "Idella, Rawlings Perfect Maid." "Idella" fills in blanks. To be sure, she was not with Rawlings through the 30s where much of "Cross Creek" is set. Nonetheless, her additions make for a more complete picture. Rawlings was, in all likelihood, bipolar, with symptoms varying in intensity. The two books combined give insight into a world that never will be again--thankfully.

`Cross Creek' is an extraordinary book written by a woman with the keen ability and insight to draw out the poetic from the mundane. An educated cosmopolitanite from the northeast, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings plunged into the rustic life of cracker Florida with a ferocity belying her Leo sun sign. She longed for the farm life, which ran deeper in her veins than did the comforts of urban living. A Pulitzer Prize writer, a naturalist, and gourmet cook, Marjorie was also handy with a shotgun as a person or two found out who mistook her gender for a sign of weakness. Marjorie was a great observer and devotee of nature which she expressed with a resonance that lingers on the heart. She animated the inanimate and bestowed upon the humblest of Florida's creatures, personality. 'Cross Creek' has reached out to me from the deep past to quicken my present experience of living in Florida. I find myself looking expectantly for personality in the natural world. The evidence already exists in 'Cross Creek'. I wish that I had known Marjorie. She died the year I was born.

As a native Floridian (although transplanted now to South Carolina), I have found the works of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings to be a welcomed homecoming and a delightful insight into the "frontier" Florida life of the 1930s and '40s. Rawlings' words are timeless because they animate a timeless period in Florida history--when things were still largely rural, natural, and undisturbed by capital investment and the tourism boon of the last thirty-plus years. "Cross Creek," moreover, is the perfect introduction to Rawlings for the uninitiated, a moving narrative of her life and career amid the backwoods and streams of a bygone Florida. Yet "Cross Creek" is not simply an autobiography; it is a lavish tale in itself. I highly recommend it.
I also suggest the motion picture version of "Cross Creek," starring Mary Steenburgen and Peter Coyote (1982?). It has recently been re-released, so you should be able to find a copy easily. The movie is perhaps "even better" than the book, with its stunning cinematography of the natural beauties of Florida woods, creeks, rivers, and swamps. It stays fairly true to the book, as well, and Steenburgen and Coyote are endearing as Rawlings and Norton Baskin. Rip Torn is another wonderful addition to the cast.
Pick both of these up today!

In the late thirties and early forties two women writers were finding in the area of the St.John's river in northeast Florida a basis for their stories, true or imagined. These two women were Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, who had discovered north Florida, and Zora Neale Hurston, who left it for New York City. Today Hurston's reputation is very great while Rawlings, who remains widely read, is generally considered sentimental. I have often thought it would be interesting to teach a class that included both Hurston and Rawlings, particularly so that one could address straight-on issues of Race in Rawlings's Cross Creek. The stories of black and white living at Cross Creek might be illumined by Hurston's stories, their uses of dialect compared, their attachment to an environment explored. I like Cross Creek, have liked it for many years, but I have always wished I could read it in the context of what the black population actually thought. Hurston might help me to do that. The best parts of Rawlings are her sensitivity to the natural world and her open acceptance of just about everybody. She lived in a world and tried to undersand it, not reform it, but it would be interesting to see how Hurston plays against her.

I had mixed feelings about this book. Before I read it I was expecting an account of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings life and how she homesteaded. While this book has some of that, it actually wasn't the type of homesteading account I thought it would be.

There isn't really a set time line to this novel. She jumps around back and forth between years and seasons and people. While she does describe some life on the farm, the majority of her time is spent describing the people of Cross Creek, and not always in the friendliest of ways.

Since this book was published before the civil rights movement, I expected some of the language that this book contains and knew it could be offensive. That didn't bother me. What bothered me was that it actually was racist. I could have respected Rawlings if the only time she appeared blatantly racist was just in her names of Black people. However, with the exception of a few she paints a picture of them being lazy, unintelligent, primitive, and quality only for servants. As she was quite the progressive lady in other ways during the novel (being divorced, running a farm on her own) she disappointed me in this area and it really spoiled the book for me.

When she's not talking about the people of Cross Creek the book is beautiful. Luscious descriptions of food she make abound and I might have to take a look at her cookbook. She describes beautiful scenery and the passing of the seasons through her farm. She describes the harvest and the natural wildlife that frequently show up unexpected in the least likely of places (snake in the bathroom). To me, the food chapter was the saving grace of this novel. In fact, its the reason I gave it as high as three stars.

If you are going to read this novel please be prepared to be offended. But also be prepared to experience the joy of running a Floridian farm.

Cross Creek
Copyright 1942
368 pages

As the other reviewer has mentioned, this is a collection of recipes, filled with anecdotes of central Florida life in the 1930s and 1940s. The recipes are fantastic and one wants to try all of them (although it may be difficult to prepare alligator-tail steak). And, what a pleasure it is to read a cookbook written by an accomplished author. You just keep picking it up.

I am absolutely delighted by this reprint of a very old favorite. The entire pesentation, from cover to end, with all the lovely new line drawings really does credit to this amazing journal of Marjorie Rawlings in the primitive Florida swamps of the '30's. I am going to get another, for a gift to my daughter. We are also going to try some of the recipes.

Frankly, I continue to be confused by the praise that this book receives. Cross Creek is an account of the author's life in the backwoods of Florida, and Rawlings does indeed do a fine job of describing the natural aspects of her surroundings. But the mean-spirited, rants that are interjected throughout the book make it near impossible to focus on her observations about nature. Many will argue that the author's racist attitudes simply reflect the language and tone of the time period, but she goes beyond simple name-calling. I did not see any light-hearted humor in the chapter in which she says that the young black girl that she "bought" from her father should have been drowned at birth, or in her description of field hands as monkeys in the trees, or in her musings about how the black race is childish and cannot be relied upon. How anyone can read these descriptions and still be left with the warm, happy feelings described in many of the reviews of this book, is truly beyond my understanding.

Had read Rawlings' book many years ago, and, having recently visited her home at Cross Creek, decided to reread it. More enjoyable the second time around. Her descriptive narrative sings with the essence of central Florida living circa 1930s. Enjoy a slice of history served up with grits and white bacon. Satisfying to the soul.

It was very disconserting to me to read the reviews on this book and and see the term " racism " used so much. Ms. Rawlings revealed the old south and old Florida as it was and is and will always will be. Accept it or don't waste your time reading this marvelous book of the old south of and of old Florida. Robert G. Holloway