A Most Magical Place

The most magical place in Florida is Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ home. It’s an old Cracker farmhouse, quiet and hot, surrounded by orange groves and the certain sense time has stopped.

The only way to get there is to suspend time and space. And to come from the north is to cross the Styx, a slow muddy river between Ocala horse country and the college town of Gainesville in North Florida. The Styx—the river of hate-- is one of five rivers that divide the land of the living from the land of the dead in Greek mythology. The other rivers of forgetfulness, fire, lamentation and woe did not hold a big enough place in classic Greek mythology to impress the early settlers who played the name game in north Florida.  The fact that land is hot and snaky as hell south of the river probably played into the river’s title.   

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and her first husband Charles Rawlings arrived from the cool north.  Born in 1896, Majorie wrote stories from the age of five or six.  Her early childhood was privileged. Her father was a patent office lawyer in Washington DC but his heart and his daughter were often at his farm outside in Maryland. Marjorie was a Daddy’s Girl. Her relationship with her Mother was difficult.  She grew up while women were getting the vote and graduated from the University of Wisconsin and married her college sweetheart when he returned from World War I.  The marriage was troubled, and when Marjorie received a small inheritance from the sale of her father’s farm, she consulted her husband’s brothers who lived in north Florida about a place to live. They helped her choose a working orange grove with a house dating back to the 1890s situated between Orange and Lochloosa Lakes.  It was also moonshine country.   By this time—1928—it was Prohibition and she was already a heavy drinker.  Although she and her husband held good reporter jobs in Louisville and Rochester, Majorie wasn’t able to write creatively in an urban setting.

 By the 1930s, the marriage and Marjorie’s husband headed south.  They divorced amicably in 1933 when Majorie’s first book, South Moon Under, a Pulitzer finalist, was published. Accounts differ, but Majorie almost certainly suffered psychological abuse and possibly personal abuse.  

South Moon Under details the life of a moonshining family and also lays out the effects of corrupt laws on people and land.  Timber companies and turpentine camps were taking over the old agrarian lifestyle. Marjorie felt at home in the old ways.  By the time Charles left, she could hunt, fish and drink shine with the boys and was attuned to the Black matriarchy that ran life at the Creek.  These were her safety nets when the bottom dropped out of the stock market in 1929.

The Yearling was published in 1939 and became a Pulitzer Prize winner the same year.  Better fortune followed but Marjorie was still enthralled by the silence and peace of Cross Creek. She survived a lawsuit by a good friend at the Creek, married a second time, weathered World War II writing to young soldiers every day and attempted with partial success to write more books. She began to change own attitudes toward race largely due a personal and professional friendship with Zora Neal Hurston, a brilliant Black novelist who also wrote about a small Florida community.

 She died at the age of 57 of a cerebral hemorrhage.

But she leaves us with our own journey.

We imagine ourselves at tourists in Miami in the early 1940s, staring at a paper Florida map placemats in a diner.  Drawings of mermaids and pirates on Florida’s west coast strike us as elementary school myths.  Instead of I-95, 441, A1A, US1 and county roads are flowing like the Karmic Rivers of birth, old age and sickness and death away from the Fountain of Youth near Tampa. 

We choose 441 as our ticket out. This is the Route 66 of Florida.  Decades later Tom Petty wrote about it in his song “American Girl”.

       “She was an American Girl raised on promises…She stood alone on the balcony. Yeah she could hear the cars roll by out on 441 like waves crashing on a beach.”

Exhaust shimmer and green lights combine to carry us past Palm Beach mansions.  The Magic Kingdom we are seeking isn’t in Orlando and it doesn’t exist in our 1940s mental continuum.  We think about gator farms as we skirt Big Daddy Don Garlits Drag Racing Museum and a small strip club named Café Risqué, both imaginary at this point.  Now we enter County Road 325, the River Styx is right around the bend near One-Beer Road, and we are home.

The heat is prehistoric and clocks have stopped.  Our busy imagination is still.  We slip three bucks a carload into the honor system box, and as we enter, we pass a Rawling’s quote talking about the enchantment of Cross Creek.

In the book Cross Creek published in 1942, she hinted at the force of nature which is the flip side of rural peace.

       “All life is a balance, when it is not a battle, between the forces of creation and the forces of destruction, between love and hate, between life and death. Perhaps it is impossible to say where one ends and the other begins, for even creation and destruction are relative.” Rawlings wrote.

Because we have taken house tour so many times, we just sit on a wooden bench in partial shade and listen to insects crank up a dissonant concert,  Flowers, chickens and the wind in the trees are different from the flowers, chickens and wind we noted during our last visit.  The markers morph into one standard light sound and noise show as we wait.  After a while, we walk slowly in the heat around the rusted, parked 1940 Oldsmobile and read a sundial showing high noon:  Grow Old Along with Me.  The Best is Yet to Be.”  These words surround a gnomon shaped like a man carrying a scythe.  Is the part of the sundial that throws the shadow figure the Grim Reaper or just Father Time?

The Pulitzer Prize in the house probably hasn’t moved since our last visit, but we can tell time passes because in the right season, the blossoms on old orange trees smell like perfume.

It is time to return to our own time.  The route is efficient and boring.  Because we are heading south we avoid the Styx.  We have not aged but the magic of Cross Creek has not been able to return our youth. The magic has, however, stilled the ticking internal clock that measures what we do, when we do it and how our accomplishments measure up to each other and eternity.

Wiser, if not older, our mental vacation has given us a way home.