We are in Maine and I have been reading voraciously. Not since childhood summer vacations have I read so much. I am bewitched.
Nothing contemporary. I am reading Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings's Cross Creek, a trip into another time and place, her home in rural Florida orange groves in the 30’s [the book came out in 1942, when the author, whose life spanned 1896-1953, was 46]. The copy I found on a book shelf in the rental we’re staying in is a first edition and inscribed “Ruth Lunt April 1942,” a month before my birthday. Someone I know visited the house represented on the book’s dust jacket not long ago. She reported that the house was virtually as Rawlings left it, including her typewriter and car.
Wonderful little stories about the author’s life in this backwater and her few white and black neighbors and the land, flora, and fauna. Extraordinary and accessible writing. A minor masterpiece, I thought after the first 39 pages, if that number were any measure and I am any judge. Not sad but tugging at my heart. A simpler world. What more could one ask?
Later on there is an amazing chapter that is essentially the culinary anthropology of a culture where virtually everything eaten was raised, shot, or taken from the lakes and streams by the community. Maybe cornmeal and wheat flour came from the store. The recipes are a revelation.
But I can say after finishing the book that if anyone decides to take on Cross Creek, be warned that this is more than warm and fuzzy nostalgia. You will get a sympathetic but powerful reminder of the status and conditions of African Americans in the rural south in the 30’s, and their relationship with their white counterparts and employers and the law, which we have swept conveniently under the historical carpet. This is a book of essays about real people and events, not fiction. The racial drama and culture are not politically correct but they put our contemporary situation in vivid perspective.
Just before I read Cross Creek I had, by happenstance, re-read the last book accepted for publication by Rawlings’s editor at Scribners, the great Maxwell Perkins: Cry, The Beloved Country (1948), by Alan Paton – still powerful and, 70 years later, still relevant to the human condition, and not just for South Africa. The racial parallels of Paton’s book with the world of Cross Creek are striking, though uniquely different. We all in the West, by heritage and privilege, bear a terrible responsibility, which I struggle to lock away in a dark cabinet of my mind. Paton unlocks the cabinet and throws open the door.
Cross Creek is in print, brought to you by Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
| Copyright © 2018 by Neil Hoffmann |
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