Travels with Susan

 Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings: Connections

Cross Creek

Constructing an unconventional memoir composed of sketches of people, nature, and seasonal activities, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings writes of ecologies of place and self, environment and society in the lush seclusion of her small Florida community, Cross Creek (1942). Understanding that “There is a close affinity between people and places” (10), she charts her own identity and “spiritual geography” (313) through her entangled, personal knowledge of the Florida scrub. As she writes, “We at the Creek draw our conclusions about the world [and the self] from our intimate knowledge of one small portion of it” (372). Although the memoir is not organized chronologically, there is a chronology or progression in the knowledge of place and self that emerges, beginning with introductions to the inhabitants and landscape of the Creek and ending with a labyrinthine journey through the waterways of north central Florida and whatever had been haunting her to a philosophy of community and compassion.

Echoing a primitivist, primal understanding of "racial memory” that “the consciousness of land and water must lie deeper in the core of us than any knowledge of our fellow beings” (10), she carefully, lovingly draws lyrical descriptions of the environment that make it more than literary “setting” but a being that shapes a peculiar, Floridian Cracker consciousness and identity. Beginning with descriptions of the trees, birds, animals, that surround her home and then stretching to forays into the wild through hunting and fishing trips, Rawlings draws a dark, rich, fecund nature that delights with its seasonal routines and changes in weather. She writes, “I do not understand how any one can live without some small place of enchantment to turn to” and then goes on to describe the lakeside hammock where “the breathing of the earth is yet audible”; the Spanish moss, the yellow jessamine, the red trumpet vine that “shouts from the gray trunks” and the autumn holly berries “small bright lamps in the half-light” (45). The scamper of squirrels, a prowling skunk, the covey of quail “making small soft cries” populate the nearby environs. Being among them, “on their own ground,” creates “a feeling of expanding one’s own world, as when a foreign country is visited” (45). The lists of the water birds—long-legged herons and cranes, sea-gulls, wild duck, coots, fish-hawks -- and plants—seedling pecan trees, trifoliata, spiderwort, coffee-weed, blackberry bushes— imply the abundance of life and slow the pace of reading, imitating the languid pace of life in Cross Creek (44-46). It is a lush environment that invites enchantment, has a touch of magic, that enfolds and entangles her. With each delicious description or sketch of the natural world, she is enlarging her (and her reader’s) world and consciousness, making the familiar foreign as the foreign becomes more familiar with understanding and knowledge. There is a correlation between nature’s richness, variety, life-breathing pulse and her prose style. Her attention to detail creates a sense of wonder, almost breathless as she breathes life into the heavy air of the South and of her writing. The reader can see the colors of the sky, feel the heaviness of the air, hear the creatures calling out to each other.

Some of her most evocative descriptions bring to life the coming of night, the approach of rain, seasonal changes of atmosphere. Among her chapters, four depict the seasons, one each, collapsing, no doubt, thirteen years of springs and winters, summers and autumns, into one event, much as Henry David Thoreau collapsed his two years at Walden Pond into one for the sake of his book. Although she writes that “Here in Florida the seasons move in and out like nuns in soft clothing” (254), she carefully relates the coming and going of the seasons, the animals and plant-life, the growing and hunting activities associated with each. Particularly evocative are descriptions of changes in weather. Bringing into play color, motion, sound, and touch, she recounts how “One day in June a cloud passes over the sun in the late afternoon.” The sky changes color to gray, and the air becomes so still that even the “restless Spanish moss hangs motionless.”  From that stillness “an impalpable breath stirs,” causing the palms to bend and the moss on the hammock to lift. A “sibilant sound” emits from the pecan trees, the sky’s gray thickens, and then the rain “marches visibly across the palms and orange trees.” After the shower passes “the air is as fresh and clean as April” and the night “will be cool for sleeping” (285).  Going through the seasons she demonstrates the cycle of life in the ecology of this particular place, ending with winter, orange-picking season. She finds purpose and beauty in each season, “the aesthetic delights of duck-hunting” (332) and the loveliness of fatwood fires among the orange trees on chilled winter nights (347). Observations of the seasons and the lives of nature’s people—the birds, plants, livestock, even the reptiles-- play into a bioethical philosophy that “We were all one with the silent pulsing [of the hammock]. This was the thing that was important, the cycle of life . . . . the cosmic life” and its rhythms (46-47).

Place is not just about environment; it is also about community. In addition to her sensitive depictions of the natural world, Rawlings draws sketches of the local characters, sometimes astutely, understanding personal and social dynamics, and sometimes tinged with the prejudices of her time. A new-comer to the region, she finds that one way of learning a community is to go out in it: “For learning a new territory and people as quickly as possible, I recommend taking the census on horseback” as she did with her friend Zelma in 1930. Going to the lonely cabins, among gaunt cattle and turpentine trees and illegal stills, she sees Black lives and stalwart wives. Another way of learning a community she discovers is to hire locals to work for her, women to work in the house, men to work the farm and orange groves. Many of her character sketches center on these people, usually Black, like the irrepressible ‘Geechee, who serve her. Although these characters come to life under her pen and she assigns them wit, wisdom, and a voice of their own, Rawlings cannot escape a white, upper-middle-class perspective.  Her sketch of ‘Geechee is tangled between admiration of her gumption, an effort to train her to serve, racist comments about her appearance, and affection. ‘Geechee announces her sense of autonomy when she declares, “’Name be’s Beatrice. I be’s ‘Geechee. Folks jes’ calls me ‘Geechee,’” and informs Rawlings, “’this porch floor ain’t scrubbed’” (91). Almost simultaneously Rawlings objectifies ‘Geechee and personalizes her when she writes, “She was as wild-looking as some fresh-caught African slave, but she had given her big heart for life” (98). Who serves whom or who helps whom in this social ecology that mixes race, class, and gender complicates our reading of Rawlings. We cannot simply dismiss her as a racist or excuse her racist comments by saying that she is writing from her time, because she generally displays genuine affection for her workers and sometimes goes out of her way to help them. Following an altercation between two of Adrenna’s men and after Rawlings arranged to take the wounded man to the hospital, a woman came up to Rawlings and said, “’I want to look in the face of the white woman has got such sympathy for the black one’” (205). Even as she continues to use pejorative language that labels Blacks as childlike, primitive, and animalistic, she most often practices an ethic of sharing and caring that must have been both innate and learned. She relates that what she learned from dealing with her neighbors, Black and white, in this hard-scrabble place, is the importance and expectation of sharing: “I did not yet understand that in this way of life one is obliged to share, back and forth” (75).

Writing ecologies of place, Rawlings pays attention to local folkways and beliefs, providing ethnological, sociological insights that infuse her descriptions with more weight than the local color of regional literature. Listening to the characters of Cross Creek, Rawlings catches their sayings and songs, analyzing what they portend. In one instance, as she is describing Mr. Tubble, a destitute drifter given to drink, she explains, “He has a trick of ‘coming up missing’” and then deconstructs the local phrase’s meaning. To “come up missing” does not apply to someone like herself who is likely to be absent from the Creek. Nor does it apply, she explains, to roving cats, because they are expected to ramble. But it does apply to a dog that does not appear for breakfast or to misplaced household objects, and to Mr. Tubble who is” suddenly not in his usual haunts” (132). In another instance, she listens to the songs of the people working in the scrub. Coming across a convict road gang, composed mainly of Black men, clearing ditches, she hears them singing. Although they are performing the “service of society” through this forced labor, they hold their heads high “like African emperors” and sing. Like other observers of Southern Black life, Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. DuBois, she hears in their work chants “Songs of love, songs of death, songs of the spirit’s hope and the spirit’s despair” (291). Even though she does not probe issues of poverty, racism, and the peonage of the prison system that lie behind the gang and its songs, she does question an economic system that does not provide enough work for all or labor for the work of the region (291).  In another episode, she shares the sermon-like songs of the orange pickers, led by “Preacher” who likens their work picking oranges to climbing Jacob’s ladder, engaging the men in the call and response structure of preaching that knits them in a community of believers and strivers (370). Listening to the people of Cross Creek, carefully rendering their speech and song, Rawlings extends the scope of regional literature when she attempts sociological, ethnographical analyses to get at the heart of the people.

Someone who prides herself on her culinary skills, who would later write a Cross Creek cookbook, Rawlings uses food to describe place and people. Writing a sociology of bread, she details who eats and who prepares what kind of bread. One of the things she learned at Cross Creek is that “bread” means not the white bread that as a Northerner she is accustomed to; rather the term refers to cornbread. A Southern staple, cornbread itself is classified in tiers of sophistication, from the rich cornbread made with milk and eggs, to cornpone, to hoecake, which was baked by field hands and by soldiers during the Civil War on a hoe held over an open flame, to hushpuppies, a staple of the hunt when “hunters sat or stood around the camp fire and the Negro cooks and helpers sweat over their cooking and the hunters ate lustily” (220). Other breads of the South include hot biscuit, representing a “higher social caste,” and ice-box rolls, preferably cooked in a Dutch oven with live coals for heat, as she cooks during her hunting excursions. In her quick taxonomy of bread, race, class, and gender get explained, cooked over her lively coals.

And she writes about Voodoo and conjure, potent forces at the Creek. The chapter on Fall is as much about voodoo and conjure as it is about the change in weather. Rawlings’s rumination about the wisdom of Martha, one of her Black neighbors, begins when the autumn storms are late. It is then, as the village meets to pray for rain and the communal depression and blues infect her, that she begins “to put stock in Martha’s voodoo” (311). Rawlings recounts Martha’s various tales of disaster and the means for confronting or avoiding calamity, like the “conjur bag” that must contain the “right bone from a black cat”; recognizing the ominous signs of “fumble-dust”; when to clean or sweep; how to repel hawks and chicken snakes by setting out the body of “the last hawk shot” or hanging a dead chicken snake in the “crotch of a grapefruit tree” (312). A stranger to the beliefs and practices that Martha professes, Rawlings confesses that she learned to listen to her, understanding that “Facts are ineffably simpler than explanations” and that for a people confined geographically to place, Blacks’ “spiritual geography . . . reaches far” out to the universe (313). As she relates Martha’s tales and conjures, she mentions Zora Neale Hurston, who had used the word “fombé” in her book on Haitian and Southern tales in 1935, respecting and yet qualifying her work when she refers to Hurston, the woman who  trained “the spy-glass of Anthropology” on the Black South as “the Florida Negress” (Hurston 1; Rawlings 311). Even so, including these folkways and beliefs in her memoir, Rawlings expands the social ecology of place as she extends her own spiritual geography by allowing for the possibility of unseen cosmic forces.  

At the end of the narrative and presumably at the end of her stay at Cross Creek, Rawlings falls into a depression. She “lost touch with the Creek” (354) and life seemed a nightmare. Her friend Dessie prescribes a river trip, just the two of them, two women alone following the flows and stagnations of marsh and river, churning through and being taken by the hyacinths that filled the channels and confused their route. Finding maps unhelpful in navigating the waterways, she gives herself over to the currents. When she does, “The strangeness of flowing water was gone, for it was all there was of living” (359). Giving herself up to “the silent pulsing” of water and nature (46), she expresses a bio/socio-ethical philosophy based on a sense of community with and compassion for the natural and human inhabitants of her part of Florida. Witnessing the cycles of life on the river and at the Creek she realizes that the struggle to survive “is better done in love than in hate” (376-77). And she comes to realize, as John Steinbeck illustrated in The Grapes of Wrath, that “the earth may be borrowed but not bought. It may be used but not owned. It gives itself in response to love and tending” (380). Humans are not masters or possessors of the land, but tenants and lovers of it. The owner of an orange tree farm, she understands that she cannot possess it; it belongs to itself, the cycles of nature, and the people who are a part of it, the workers who protect and harvest the oranges.

The lessons she articulates in these last chapters reverberate throughout the narrative, informing descriptions of the camaraderie of the hunt and the farm, the enchantment of the natural world, and her compassion for community. Understanding place, Cross Creek, she understands her place in it and the larger environment as a chronicler of the folk who make it a home. Like Henry David Thoreau, who “went off to live in the woods alone, to find out what the world was like” (371), she has drawn conclusions about the world from her “intimate knowledge of one small portion of it” (372).

The Yearling

This sense of community, of being part of an environmental and human universe, of cosmic connection, gets played out in The Yearling (1938) as the boy Jody comes of age in a place both magical and dangerous. Feeling emotional connections to nature’s beauty and the camaraderie of working the land and hunting with his father, hearing the stories of past exploits, coming to a visceral understanding of the cycles of life and death, in the end, Jody accepts his role in an ecology grounded in family and place. His journey to adulthood is facilitated, if not caused by a deep, emotional journey in place.

Being out in the Florida scrub or working on the family farm in the years following the Civil War, he has an intimate, physical connection to the natural world, which is both magical and perilous. In her evocative lyrical prose, Rawlings describes an environment rich in life and abundance. As she sets the scene for her novel and the Baxter homestead, she describes an afternoon “alive with soft stirrings” as the wild bees emerge from the winter, burrowing into “the fragile clusters of lavender bloom” of the chinaberry blossoms near the front gate (1).  Abandoning his hoe, the boy Jody responds to nature’s stirrings to ramble through the woods in search of a bee-tree redolent with amber honey.  Living on the verge of wild nature, it is easy enough to slip into the richness of the woods where in April the tar-flower, fetter-bush, and sparkleberry are in bloom, to wander the swamps and rivers, and to race to the sink hole where the family gets its water, its springs bubbling up clear water, to be a part of that natural world.

One afternoon while out fishing with his father, who was “stern about not taking more of anything, fish or game, than could be eaten or kept,” father and son see a flock of whooping cranes “dancin’” (111). As some of the cranes dance and swoop, others croon a “strange music” making it seem as if the birds were “dancing a cotillion” (112). Reflected in the waters of the marsh as the sun was setting, they seem to be “Magic birds . . . dancing in a mystic marsh” (113). Awed by what they have witnessed, Pa and Jody “were in a trance from the strong spell of its beauty” (114). Catching moments like this, Rawlings shows that nature is not just a familiar place or an escape from the confines of home, but one that holds a kind of spiritual, “unearthly” awe, its own truths (114).  Beauty like this, Rawlings avers, stirs an “emotional reaction” that calls up a “spiritual excitement” that speaks of more than the “sensory perception” of grace and color, that hints of ethereal realities beyond mere factual truth (McCutcheon 354).

The Florida scrub delights with magical moments like this one, but it is also a place of precarity, where danger, threat, and loneliness are tethered to its beauty and awe.  Along with moments that stir attachment to the natural world, the novel plots the multiple dangers the family endures: the hunts after Old Slewfoot, the rogue bear that takes Baxter livestock and mauls Julia, a favorite hunting dog; the time the rattlesnake sprang out of the brush and bit Penny, Jody’s father, on the arm, leaving him near death and debilitated for weeks; the fierce hurricane that ravages the land, leaving fields devastated and woodland animals dead, afflicted with the black tongue plague; and the back injury that puts Penny to bed, relying on Jody to do a man’s work on the farm. Woven into these episodes, the theme of food and its scarcity textures danger, Ma wailing her “laments when the crops were ruined” (321). The specter of starvation that takes shape after the hurricane is reinforced when Jody’s pet deer nibbles away the few crops left to plant and when the distraught boy, lost and alone in the wild, feels the pangs of hunger.

Congruent with nature’s precarity and lushness, Rawlings sketches a social environment marked by loneliness and community. Baxter’s Island, the family clearing, stands separate from other homesteads in the scrub; the Fergussons and Grandma Hutto, the nearest neighbors, a long walk from Baxter’s Island. Lonely for something of his own to love, Jody begs his father, “Cain’t I git me a leetle ol’ fawn for a pet for me?” (115-16). After Penny has killed a doe to get her liver to extract the rattlesnake’s poison from his body, Jody is allowed to take her orphaned fawn as a pet. Loneliness, friendship, and death are linked again when Jody’s closest friend, Fodder-wing, the boy with a crumpled body but imaginative mind who loves creatures, dies early in the novel. With his death, Jody experiences feelings of loss and belonging that reverberate in his coming of age: “Now he understood. This was death. Death was a silence that gave back no answer” (244). But with death and loss, he comes to understand the workings of cosmic interdependence, that “Something of [Fodder-wing] had been always where the wild creatures fed and played. . . . he was of the earth” and that “he need not be lonely for his friend again. He could endure his going” (261-63). The dichotomy of isolation and belonging is further highlighted by the Fergusson family of rambunctious giants of sons. They are more likely to quarrel and fight, but when Penny is laid up by the snake bite, Buck Fergusson stays with the family, doing the chores that Penny could not. As Grandma Hutto puts it, “Well, folks that seems like kin-folks, is kin-folks” (144), suggesting fluid ties of kinship and belonging in the scrub. Even Ory, Jody’s mother who lost so many children before Jody, lonely in her house while the man and boy work outside and take off on hunting jaunts, feels connections to place and family that keep her fretting about how to feed her small brood. Despite the hardships and loneliness that pervade life in the scrub, there is an abiding sense of belonging—to each other, to place, and to the scant community of scrubbers.

A boy’s book, The Yearling ties Jody’s initiation to a community of men through the ritual activities of hunting and storytelling. Tracking Old Slewfoot and hunting for food with his father, Jody learns not only skills of tracking and hunting, but also the uses of the wild. When Jody shoots a buck, he feels a sickness as he looks at its glazed eyes, wishing “’we could git our meat without killin’ it.’” His father responds, “Hit’s a pity, a’right. But we got to eat” (128). Although the boy dreams there would be enough for everyone, the family, the farm animals, the birds singing in the trees and the quails nesting nearby, he learns that all beings are connected in an ecology of survival and predation: “Out in the scrub, the war raged ceaselessly. The bears and wolves and panthers and wild-cats all preyed on the deer” and so on down to the smallest creatures and his own family’s need to hunt for food (168-69). Yet even in this environment of survival, “Penny would shoot nothing for which he could not see a use,” musing, “’Seems like there’d ought to be room enough in the world for folks and creeturs both’” (294). Unlike the Forresters for whom a shot “was a shot, whether or no they could use the game” (293), Penny practices an ethics of responsibility and respect toward the wild things, understanding that even though he farms the land, “there’s nary thing on earth he kin call his own” (284). Hunting with his father, listening to him, Jody begins to understand what it is to be a man taking care of a family on the edge of the wild. As Penny explains to his wife, “How’s Jody to learn to hunt and be a man if his daddy don’t carry him along and learn him?” (117).

Coming together to tell stories of past hunts, “The good male talk” (384), storytellers like Pa join past to present, event to mystery, culture to environment, and listener to teller, projecting a future when the listener (Jody) becomes a storyteller. An ancient art form, storytelling invites bonding through communal memory and meaning making out of the unexplained and mundane phenomena of the physical world. Taking on a life of its own, story is not only an act of spinning yarns to entertain but is a space where value and insight, conviviality and aspiration reside (Berry 43). When Pa tells the Forresters about his foiled attempt to kill Old Slewfoot, “The story, Jody thought, was even better than the hunt.” He listens as his father weaves “a spell of mystery and magic, that held these huge hairy men eager and breathless” as they imaginatively join in the hunt (69-70). Later, as he watches two male bears fighting, Jody muses, “It was good to become old and see the sights and hear the sounds that men saw and heard, like Buck and his father. . . . He felt himself moving into a mystic company. He had a tale now of his own to tell on winter evenings” (241). After Slewfoot has finally been killed, Jody has his chance to tell the story to the group gathered at Christmas celebrations: “He began at the beginning and tried to tell it as he thought Penny would do” but half-way through he is distracted by pound cake and other Christmas goodies, his initiation into the “male talk” and the “mystic company” of men begun but not realized (432-33). He still has one more initiation, the most difficult of all, before he can join the community of storytellers and men.

The novel, and Jody’s lessons, come to a head when Flag, now a nimble yearling, destroys and eats the crops the family depends on while Penny is unable to work because of his back injury. The now troublesome deer that has been a pet to Jody, a companion who followed him about, has emerged from its own childhood and can neither be contained nor released to the wild. Instead, he has to be put down for the sake of the household, which is barely holding on after the string of disasters. Desperate, Pa tells him, “. . .  we cain’t have our year’s crops destroyed. We cain’t all go hungry. Take the yearlin’ out in the woods and tie him and shoot him” (479). When Jody refuses to shoot the deer, his frustrated mother picks up the gun and wounds Flag, leaving Jody finally to commit the coup de grace: “Go finish him, Jody. You got to put him outen his torment” (488).

Because it seems that his parents have orchestrated the death of his pet and his own hand in it, Jody feels betrayed—“’Pa went back on me’” (493)-- and runs away to the deep woods, bound he knows not where. Lost and alone, he wanders a labyrinthine way “following the endless curves and bays and indentations” of the river. Without food, eating grass and dreaming of his mother’s cooking, he becomes so hungry that he finally understands: “This, then, was hunger,” what his mother had warned of (497). Plagued with “nightmare-ridden sleep” (496-97), sobbing and grieving, he finally realizes that he has nowhere else to go but back to Baxter’s Island: “He had been out in the world, and the world was a troubled dream, fluid and desolate” (502). Whipped by the realities of life and death, yanked out of childhood, “Something was ended. Nothing was begun” (503).  He returns home, not to the idyll of his childhood, but to the grim realities of an adulthood forced on him too early. His father, who has suffered so much in the novel and yet has tried to nurture his family, tells his son, “’I’m sorry you had to learn it that-a-way. . . . You’ve  done come back different. You’ve takened a punishment. You ain’t a yearlin’ no longer.  . . . Boy, life goes back on you” (506-07). Penny, who has been uneasy all his life, knows the realities of life and his responsibility to land and household. This is what Jody is on a trajectory to learn.

The novel ends soberly enough. Jody will stay and farm the clearing; “He would be lonely all his life. But a man took it for his share and went on” (509). His initiation out of childhood brings him home, to the place where he belongs, where he will play out another telling of the ancient story of life and death and of a cosmic ecology grounded in family and place. Although the Baxters are poor and will always struggle to scratch a living from the Florida scub, they exemplify something of what Wendell Berry describes in The Unsettling of America. Claiming that “…the care of the earth is our most ancient and most worthy and, after all, our most pleasing responsibility” (14), Berry asserts, “We are working well when we use ourselves as the fellow creatures of the plants, animals, materials, and other people we are working with. Such work is unifying, healing. It brings us home from pride and from despair, and places us responsibly withing the human estate” (140). Perhaps this is the true lesson Pa teaches and Jody will learn, that there is a moral quality to working with fellow creatures, of honoring the interdependence of humans with nature in the cosmic web of being. This may also be the lesson Rawlings learns during her stay at Cross Creek.

Ever since she began taking writing seriously, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was intrigued by what she called cosmic connections, the “’private gospel’” she wanted to preach about the interconnections and interdependences that bind humans to each other, to the environment, and to the spiritual cosmos (McCutchan 61). Writing about the Florida scrub, paying attention to its wildlife and local characters, she discovered the intimate and oftentimes fraught ecology that informs her sense of moral responsibility to the land and to the people who live on it.  In The Yearling and Cross Creek she writes a land ethic that is reflected in a social ethic of care for others, that links the ways we treat the land with the ways we treat others, and that blends spiritual and ecological understandings of the unity pervading all things. Recognizing, as Grandma Hutto put it ‘”’folks that seems like kin-folks, is kin-folks” (144), that we are all related, she looks through a cosmic lens that extends regional ecologies to cosmic geographies.

One wonders, however, to what extent is this cosmic connection, this bio/social ethic is a feature of Southern literature. How does the richness of the land inspire an insight into the cosmos? John Muir began to form a land ethic during his 1867 trek to the Gulf of Mexico and his stay in Florida that has room for the spikey, dangerous plants and animals, recognizing that he is “part and parcel of nature,” a member of a cosmic ecological community (Muir 212). And Wendell Berry of Kentucky farmland espouses an ethics of moral responsibility to the land and household, finding in agriculture, the care of the earth our most pleasing responsibility. And yet much of Southern literature also recounts (and critiques) consumeristic, racist assumptions and practices toward the land and many of the people who inhabit it. One need only look at the example of William Faulkner’s Thomas Sutpen who with his slaves and captured French architect dragged house, gardens, and plantation out of the Mississippi earth, and who disavowed his relations to his darker kin, to understand the darker underside of connectedness and the use of the land.  Perhaps this is what Rawlings is countering in her characters, giving them dignity and place in the moral ecologies she writes.

Works Cited:

Berry, Wendell. The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture. New York: Avon Books, 1977.

Hurston, Zora Neale. Mules and Men. New York: Harper Collins, 1935.

McCutchan, Ann. The Life She Wished to Live: A Biography of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Author of “The Yearling.” New York: W. W. Norton, 2021.

Muir, John. A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf. Edited by William Frederic Bade. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1916.

Rawlings, Marjorie Kinnan. Cross Creek. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1942.

-----.  The Yearling (1938). New York: Aladdin Classics, 2001.