Cross Creek: The Narrator

Will the Real Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Please Step Forward?: The Problematic Persona of Rawlings as Narrator in Cross Creek

It is difficult when looking at any semi-autobiographical work to separate truths from fictions and the authors from the characters they have chosen to represent themselves. When dealing with a work, such as Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings's Cross Creek, the problem becomes even more perplexing, because the character we are presented with is so filled with contradictions that one doesn't know where to begin. Are we to focus on the Cross Creek Rawlings that is presented as a thoughtful country girl/frontierswoman at heart, attempting to become more attuned to nature and truly at home only in her rural Florida home? Or, is the elitist, racist Rawlings who presents herself, in what she seems to believe is the best possible light, more accurate?

Early on in Cross Creek, we are given glimpses into both sides of Rawlings's character as portrayed in the book. In the first chapter, "For This is an Enchanted Land," we are told the anecdote of Rawlings's "old fence" (Rawlings 9). In the incident, Rawlings and a neighbor discuss the possibility of replacing or repairing a shabby old fence on her property. Rawlings assures the neighbor that she means simply to repair it. She is sure that a more "elegant fence would bring to the Creek a wanton orderliness that is out of place" (Rawlings 9). Rawlings goes on to describe the entire area of Cross Creek in terms of its awareness of "wind and rain and harsh sun and the encroaching jungle . . . ready at any moment to take over" (Rawlings 10). Rawlings demonstrates that she shares an awareness of nature with her neighbors. Her fence is a metaphor of the people of Cross Creek and their symbiosis with the land. Replacing the old fence with a new one would display an arrogance that flies in the face of the residents' understanding of the power of nature to overrun, replace, and consume humans and their petty concerns. Here Rawlings, in a short passage that is ostensibly simply about a fence, begins to lay the groundwork for her closing argument in Cross Creek, that: "individual man is transitory" (Rawlings 367) and that: "the Earth may be borrowed and not bought. It may be used, but not owned . . . we are tenants and not possessors . . . 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" (Rawlings 368).

And, yet, this Rawlings, the almost transcendental nature lover who seems concerned with the metaphysical and mankind's relationship with nature, the woman who writes of "love of nature, love of all mankind" (Rawlings 365) is the same Rawlings represented in the chapter entitled, "Catching One Young." "Catching One Young" deals with such elitist, materialistic topics as how to "take over a very young Negro girl and train her in my ways . . . preferably without home ties so that she should become attached to me" (Rawlings 77). Rawlings goes on to describe picking a servant from "too early a litter," paying her father five dollars for the child (Rawlings 77-78).

Besides this passage, along with other obvious racist overtones in her work, Rawlings displays a disturbing concern for breeding and bloodlines. References to a character's ancestral heritage's influencing his or her current behavior abound throughout the work. Early on, she looks at her own "Pearce blood, clamoring for change and adventure" (Rawlings 19). Later, she goes on about her theory that Martha's virtues can trace their origins to Martha's having "descended from old African kings and queens" (Rawlings 25). She returns to the subject yet again when discussing George Fairbanks, proclaiming that his "aloofness" and "central integrity" come from his "good blood" (Rawlings 126).

Ironically, the section discussing George Fairbanks, entitled "Residue," is essentially an attempt by Rawlings to exemplify her egalitarian beliefs. Here, and in several other sections, Rawlings attempts to show that she considers the poor to be blessed with the absence of "a confusing protective mass of extraneous and irrelevant matter" (Rawlings 122). Later, in "My Friend Moe," Rawlings presents herself as an enlightened member of the elite. In this representation Rawlings is gifted with breeding and an understanding of the lower classes. Further, she is burdened with the responsibility of the upper class, a noblesse oblige. Rawlings clearly shows a commendable concern for the well being of others in these sections, but there seems to be a preoccupation with class and wealth. We find the poor folk of Cross Creek defined more by their lack of wealth than by any true personality traits, to the point where many of the residents of Cross Creek seem to blend together into a mob of destitute neighbors. This mob so desperately needs and benefits from Rawlings's generosity in the form of medical expenses for Moe's daughter in Chapter 12 and the various acts of charity towards the Townsends in Chapter 4, that one can't help but wonder if Rawlings were suddenly to leave how the simple folk of Cross Creek would survive.

Rawlings hasn't made it easy for us to accept her book Cross Creek at face value. True, we can look at it as both an examination of the area and its inhabitants. Its episodic narrative allows Rawlings the opportunity to voice what seems to be her genuine love for the land and nature, in general. We also understand that the character she creates for herself in Cross Creek is understandably just that, a character or persona. Yet, we can't help but become bogged down by the baggage that the contradictory and amorphous character brings to the book. Some people may be able to dismiss the character's flaws as a product of a less enlightened time; yet, the events in the book take place less than a century ago. Perhaps, the only answer is to look at the work as a whole and understand that art, just like the individual personality, can be filled with both egalitarian and more elitist principles. As Idella Parker writes of Rawlings, "she was a human being, with human faults and troubles" (Parker ix). At the end of the day, we must be careful not to accept Rawlings as a prophet simply because she is a talented artist. Just as importantly, we must not crucify her for her flaws, no matter how egregious they are by today's standards, because those flaws do not alter neither the beauty of her prose nor the enlightenment of her sentiments towards the natural world.

--Brent Kimball

Works Cited

• Parker, Idella. Idella: Marjorie Kinnan Rawling's 'Perfect Maid'. Gainseville: University Press of Florida, 1992.
• Rawlings, Marjorie Kinnan. Cross Creek. New York: Collier Books, 1987.