It’s the anniversary of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ birthday, born on August 8, 1896, in Washington D.C. I’ve written about Rawlings in a previous post, linked here. She has been one of my favorite authors since I read The Yearling in high school. In December 2019, I visited Rawlings’ home in Cross Creek, Florida, for a delightful Open House hosted by the Friends of the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Farm. During the lantern-lit tour of the old farmhouse, we were ushered into a room that held all of her works on display behind glass, including versions of her books translated into other languages. Seeing all of her books housed together gave me the idea that I’d like to read my way through Marjorie, start to finish. I set out in January of this year with a printout of her works in chronological order, and my stack of Rawlings’ books that I have accumulated over many years. 

Rawlings’ first published writings were short stories, spanning the years between 1931 and 1949. Her novels fall within those years, so I read her earliest short stories first, then moved to her first novel, South Moon Under, published in 1933. In her short stories, Rawlings practiced character sketches and scenes from what she saw in this remote corner of Florida, an area referred to as “the Big Scrub.” She was developing an ear for the patterns of speech, watching interactions of moonshiners and subsistence farmers, familiarizing herself with a land of hidden swamp and overgrown hammock,  then incorporating these elements into her later, better known novels.

South Moon Under was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and in it, Rawlings captures the lifelong struggles of Florida Crackers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The book’s title refers to one of the moon’s stages, what they believed to be a critical influence upon hunting and crops, the basis for survival or death. 

A neighbor of Piety’s has taken her son Lant under his wing, passing along his knowledge of survival in the scrub:

They had become cronies, as close as the distance between them allowed. They visited back and forth several times a year. Paine had passed on to the boy his lore of scrub and hammock… “Why, the boy’s right,” he said. “He knows the deer feeds on the moon, like most ary wild creeter. Four times the deer feeds. Stirs or feeds. Moon-rise and moon-down, and south-moon-over and south-moon-under. Come moon-rise, say, the deer’s done been sleepin’, ain’t they? They comes out about a hour ‘fore the moon. They feeds a while and frolics a while.”

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, South Moon Under, (New York: Grossett & Dunlap, 1933), 100.

I finished South Moon Under, but before I could start the next story, the world as we knew it ground to a halt. It was the middle of March 2020. And I don’t think I’m alone when I confess that I just couldn’t. Couldn’t read. Couldn’t write. Prepare meals? Shower? Were those things really necessary every day? We all were paralyzed in overwhelming uncertainty about everything we knew up to that point. 

After a bit, I resumed reading, but I took a detour away from my Marjorie project. I had lost my enthusiasm for it. Instead, I followed a reading route that paralleled the mood of quarantine: May Sarton (A Journal of Solitude), then Virginia Woolf (A Room of One’s Own). Next, my brother and I created a two-person book club on Faulkner, so I read As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, and a partial read of Absalom! Absalom!. That was followed by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Harriet Beecher Stowe. It was more reading in four months than I’ve managed to do in a long time.

It’s August now, it’s Marjorie’s birthday, and I must get back to the Florida scrub.  The next book on the list is Golden Apples, not considered one of her strongest works. I read it many years ago, and I will admit that it didn’t make much of an impression on me. So we’ll see. Maybe I’ll post something about it here after I have finished it.

Here is one more quote from South Moon Under, just a sample of so many visually rich descriptions of her beloved Florida wilderness that Rawlings left us in her writings:

The scrub was clearing. Instead of the cathedral half-light, as though the sun came down from high small windows, the space ahead was bright. Lant stepped suddenly out of the scrub and was on a dim wagon road. Ahead was a low stretch of gallberry flats and beyond, a growth of small bay trees, “the bay.” 

The precipitousness with which the scrub stopped always astonished Lant. It rolled, a great ocean of scrawny pine, with boundaries sharper than any sea. There were no pine breakers, feeling out an alien soil. It was there, the scrub, immense, aloof and proud, standing on its own ground, making its own conditions, like no other. When it ended, it ended, more implacably than a life, for there was something in a life that went on–a memory–a related life–a union with the earth, producing new growths and new lives. The scrub made no unions. The two swift rivers bounded it; a fringe of hammock, of swamp; as here, a strip of gallberry flats and bay-head flats; within, it was inviolable. 

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, South Moon Under, (New York: Grossett & Dunlap, 1933), 125.

A list of Rawlings’ works is located at the end of the Wikipedia entry about Rawlings, linked here.