REL 3938 Assignment: Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

            To be honest, I have never heard of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings before taking this class.  I was surprised to hear that a state park was named after her since most of the state parks we will be attending are named after Native American tribes/peoples, famous explorers, or park attractions.  However, after digging deeper into history, I began to realize how Rawlings not only deserves a state park in her name, but also how her thoughts continue to echo in the hearts and minds of those readings her books today.

            Before stepping foot on the park grounds, I took a virtual tour of the site.  In comparison, taking a virtual tour is like looking at ones memories – one can capture certain images and thoughts, however those images, limited to only the sense of vision, cannot be constructed into a full experience (which would include every sense).  The physical experience of touring the grounds was much more engaging (I would like to give a special thanks to my classmate Caroline Nickerson for her excellent tour).  

            When we arrived, the first things I noticed is that I was being attacked by a bunch of mosquitoes.  Fortunately, I had the luxury of being able to use bug spray (which was subsequently borrowed by a few other classmates).  Later on one of the porches, a huge spider (5 inches minimum length) was found perched in a web right next to the door – we all shuddered in fear.  After these two encounters with a little wildlife I began to think – Rawlings obviously had to encounter her fair share of these kinds of creatures (given that we ran into them within a mere 30 min of each other).  So if she couldn’t put on bug spray to repel mosquitos – if she lived with terrifying spiders right outside her porch door – if she didn’t even have a toilet in her house for the beginning of her life in Florida - this would mean that life in the scrubs of Florida was not an easy endeavor, but rather required a lot of strength, mentally and physically.  This hypothesis only added to my respect for Rawlings.

Being from a sophisticated northeast region and attending a University, she was not growing up in a place like rural Florida.  However, as Florence M. Turcotte claims in “For this is an Enchanted Land: Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and the Florida Environment,” at her family farm, Rawlings “learned to share her father’s love for living close to the earth” (488).  So when she and Charles Rawlings, her first husband, moved down to rural Florida, they had an interest for living away from urban areas.  Sadly, since there marriage did not last, Charles left Rawlings and she was forced to live on her own.  This independence added to her tough life. Turcotte explains how tough her life got in one anecdote where Rawlings was about to starve and was “down to a box of uneeda crackers and a can of tomato soup” (498).  Even through these hard times, as history tells us, Rawlings stayed and bonded with the local “Florida crackers” (Rawlings words).  One might ask why she enjoyed the simple life of the crackers as opposed to her more elite life up north.  Turcotte emphasizes how Rawlings did not view the crackers as bad people, but rather as “independent, self-sufficient” (492) while linking their “tenacity…to the harshness of their natural surroundings” (496).  Even though the locals always considered her an outsider from the north, Rawlings still held the crackers with high esteem and respect, which is most likely why she fell in love with Crossed Creek (the area she lived in) and the cracker culture. 

On the tour, we got a chance to look at both the Rawlings house as well as the tenant’s house.  According to Caroline, the tenant’s is about the size of what the Rawlings house originally was before all of the additions.  The tenant’s house included one room (which contained a liquor cabinet where Rawlings hid her moonshine) and a front porch.  In the Rawlings house, the back porch was used for socializing while the front porch was used for her writing.  Unfortunately I am not familiar with any of Rawlings’ literature, although I understand she considers herself a “regional writer” because she writes about the region (Florida scrubs).  However, Turcotte believes a more accurate description is an “environmental writer” because Rawlings is able to “establish [her] own connection to the natural world through her work without having experienced life in the Florida woods” (489).  Perhaps if I want to try to experience what Rawlings experienced instead of looking at images online I should simply read what she wrote. 

Right behind the tenant’s house lays the orange groves.  Rawlings has a quote where she compares “the orange grove” as a “mysterious heart of” a new world.  In order to get to this new world, one has to “leave the impersonal highway to step inside the rusty gat and close it behind.”  She compares this “impersonal highway” to long years of spiritual homelessness, of nostalgia” and the orange grove to “mystic loveliness of childhood” and “home.”  To me this quote is all about change – not gradual change but rather a sudden transformation that is very apparent.  When relating this quote to Rawlings’ life, her impersonal highway she left to get to her orange grove was the period of time she lived amongst the more elite up folks north. Rawlings’ orange grove is not just the grove behind the tenant’s house, but rather her tough but much appreciated life in the Florida scrub. 

This life that Rawlings loved, “where a man can still make a living with an axe and a gun,” was something that she believed was available to everyone, however could not be seen by everyone.  Just as some people may have a passion for music instead of sports, or academics instead of labor, Rawlings held a passion for her rough and laborious life in the Florida scrub (as opposed to a more privileged life up north), despite not everyone being able to see such beauty in the Florida scrub.  She considered the ability to see such beauty “the invisible Florida” since not everyone can “see” such beauty as she can.   Since Rawlings wanted more people to be able to experience the life she loved, not only did she share these experiences in her writings, but she also wished to preserve the Florida scrub so others would be able to come and experience her type of living for themselves.  Consequently, Rawlings was not in favor of commercial people, according to Tourette, since many of these people “had snatched what they could get,” making life hard for the crackers.  Thankfully, this desire to preserve this invisible Florida has been carried on by the State Parks who, like Rawlings, are focused on letting others take a peak at the type of life Rawlings lived.  Perhaps through such efforts, more people will begin to realize that parks such as Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings are more than just land with old houses, but rather a passage in time anyone can appreciate and love.