Enchanted Land

CROSS CREEK--Marjorie Kinnan Rowlings--Scribner ($2.50).

A dozen years ago Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings decided that she would never make a writer, quit her job on a Rochester, N.Y. newspaper, bought an orange grove at Cross Creek in Florida. There she wrote South Moon Under and The Yearling, a book that will be read, at least as a juvenile classic, when most of the books of the last 20 years are forgotten.

Cross Creek (Book-of-the-Month Club selection for April) is her reminiscent, unhurried, humorous account of how she discovered and took possession of a new U.S. literary landscape (Florida), a new literary folk (the Florida backwoods people) and the Cracker idiom whose Shakespearean and Chaucerian turns struck her sensitive ear, when she first heard them, like a blow. Above all, Cross Creek is a prose poem about the deceptively monotonous Florida land, whose deceptively soft-spoken people have become merely its human adaptation.

Martha. It was black Martha Mickens who first welcomed Author Rawlings to Cross Creek. "She came walking toward me in the grove one bright sunny December day. . . . She walked like a very young woman and walks so to this day. She is getting on to seventy. . . . She was dressed neatly in calico with a handkerchief bound around her head, bandana fashion. She was a rich smooth brown. . . . She said: 'I come to pay my respecks. I be's Martha. Martha Mickens. I wants to welcome you. Me and my man, Old Will, was the first hands on this place. . . . It's home to me. We too old now to do steady work, but I just wants to tell you, any time you get in a tight, us is here to do what we can.' " Mrs. Rawlings asked how long it was since Martha had worked in the grove. "Sugar," said Martha, "I got no way o' tellin' the years. The years comes and the years goes."

Old Martha is the matriarch of a dynasty of daughters and sons. "I was a fast-breedin' woman," she says with dignity. One daughter, Adrenna, was "shingle-butted, but what there was of butt stuck out sharply. She was a femme fatale. . . ." She could seduce any man she wanted. "I'se always taught my girls," said Aunt Martha, "to mind they manners with the men. But I'se told 'em too, does you do wrong, now mind, does you, and you gets kotched--be lady enough to bring the child into the world."

'Geechee. Then there was 'Geechee. Author Rawlings was alone at the grove, had had lots of trouble getting help. 'Geechee arrived, unasked-for. She was the ugliest Negro woman Author Rawlings had ever seen. She was the dusty black of teakwood and looked capable of murder. "I hear tell you want a girl," she said fiercely. "You take me." Author Rawlings explained that the girl was too old to learn her ways. Said 'Geechee: "If I don't do to suit you, you can cut my throat." At dawn 'Geechee began to scrub down the house--walls, floors and ceilings. She used up six cans of potash. She wore a hole in the kitchen floor pursuing a stain. "I shall never have a greater devotion," said Author Rawlings, "than I had from this woman." Soon 'Geechee grew confidential. She explained her blind eye: "I disremember did I get the lick before they put me in the jailhouse or endurin' the time they was puttin' me in the jailhouse."

One day 'Geechee said: "I got a thing to tell you. I got to have help." 'Geechee's man, Leroy, was serving a 20-year term for manslaughter. "You know people," said 'Geechee, "you can git him out. . . . He didn't do a thing. This other nigger was layin' for him. He went at Leroy and he bopped him one and Leroy be's strong and he made a pass at him and it done killed this nigger." Author Rawlings got Leroy out, gave him a job at the grove. Soon his manner was so threatening that a friend, overhearing him talk, ran out to get a revolver. Author Rawlings telephoned the jail. Said the superintendent: "We have absolutely no room for him. Send him away at once."

'Geechee went with Leroy. Three days later she was back. Then Author Rawlings found one of her five-gallon jugs of moonshine reduced to three gallons, the other to two. Said lovelorn 'Geechee: "It's the onliest way I can make out. It's the onliest thing lifts my heart up, times I think I'm jus' obliged to die." When Mrs. Rawlings fell from her horse and broke her neck, 'Geechee cared for her tenderly. But she taught Mrs. Rawlings' other two Negroes to drink. One morning Author Rawlings "awoke to pandemonium." Powerless to move in her steel brace, she heard stove lids hurled, plates smashed, shrieks. Every so often 'Geechee would stagger in to reassure her: "Kate an' Raymond's fightin', but don't you worry." "The bacon done burnt itself up, but don't you fret." "Kate is chasin' Raymond thu the grove with a butcher knife. But you jes' lay still and don't worry." So now 'Geechee comes to see Mrs. Rawlings once a year. She is always a little drunk. She says "they ain't nothin' nobody can do about it."

Economics. Cross Creek economics, the exchange of goods and services, is primitive but enormously complicated. One debt got Author Rawlings "in so labyrinthine a maze" that she never expected to get out. She thinks it was punishment for shooting Mr. Martin's pig. The pig was a pretty, "titian-haired" barrow, "light of spirit and rounded into delicious curves by his long diet of [Mrs. Rawlings'] biddy-mash, skimmed milk and petunias." One morning angry Author Rawlings "stepped to the petunia bed and shot him dead where he fed." Too late she discovered that the pig belonged to a Mr. Martin who had several notches on his gun.

The pig was repaid through the mediation of Mr. Higgenbotham, frog & snake catcher, who happened to owe Mrs. Rawlings six dollars. One day he drove up with a trussed-up sow, asked Mrs. Rawlings if she wanted to buy a pig. "Now what I got figgered out is this. That sow there is worth six dollars. . . . I owe you six dollars. If Mr. Martin takes that sow, you've paid him and I've paid you. Now how about it?"

Author Rawlings wondered why Mr. Martin would take a scrawny sow. Mr. Higgenbotham explained. "Well, when you figger on a sow, you figger on more than a sow. You buy you a sow, and directly you've got a litter of pigs to boot. . . . Now I'm carrying that sow there to Mr. Martin's boar hog. You know sows?" Mrs. Rawlings said no. "Well, a sow's peculiar. Times, she'll take, and again she'll not take. It all depends on the moon. Now last moon, she'd not of took. This moon, I figger she'll take. And if she takes--mind, if she takes Mr. Martin'll take her for the debt." Author Rawlings found the ways of Mr. Martin, Mr. Higgenbotham, sows and the moon rather complicated.

Time passed and she heard nothing. A lady is not supposed to pry into questions of debt or stockbreeding. One day she met Mr. Martin in the grocery store. Author Rawlings longed to ask him: "Did she take?" Instead she said: "The pig I owed you for. The one I was to replace--" Mr. Martin put out a big hand for her to shake: "Mis' Rawlings, the pig is paid for."

Snakes. Through twelve years of such experiences Mrs. Rawlings came to know her neighbors as well as she knew the "toady-frogs, lizards, antses and varmints." Knowing them was easier, on the whole, than learning to share her Eden with snakes. She tried to overcome her fear by playing with a pretty red, black and yellow snake in the garden. She ran it through her fingers like a necklace. She was more terrified than ever when she discovered that it was a deadly coral snake. At last she conquered her fear by learning to pick up live rattlers with a forked tube. Since Cross Creek was written, the man who showed her how has since been bitten twice by moccasins, once by a rattler. Mrs. Rawlings' herpetological heroism reached the point where she killed a moccasin in her bathroom with a Sears Roebuck catalogue.

Recalling the black snake that has lived for years under her bedroom, Author Rawlings sometimes thinks that Cross Creek belongs more to its animal than to its human inhabitants. "Who owns Cross Creek?" somebody once asked. She answers: "The redbirds, I think . . . for they will have their nests even in the face of delinquent mortgages. . . . It seems to me that the earth may be borrowed but not bought. It may be used, but not owned. . . . Cross Creek belongs to the wind and the rain, to the sun and the seasons, to the cosmic secrecy of seed, and beyond all, to time."

It is this closeness to the fierce Florida earth and its creatures that has enabled Author Rawlings to find, under the monotony of the Florida landscape, the secret of its haunting beauty, which is savage, reptilian and furtive. Like all her books, Cross Creek is saved from too much floral fragrance by her deep sense that, under the exuberance of subtropical growth, violence lies always coiled and ready to strike.

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