Ice cream at Marjorie's
Reflecting on a day spent at the writer's home for her 128th birthday
The last time I was here, I wrote about the New York Times review of a new memoir— ”Mango. Gun. Handcuffs. Could a story get any more Floridian?”—and questioned whether the headline described Florida as it is perceived or Florida as it is experienced. There’s not some great esoteric link between this essay and that one. Instead, the connection is pretty simple: Mangos.
I spent the day in Cross Creek at Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s house two months ago, where a small group gathered to honor the author’s 128th birthday. With mango ice cream and cupcakes, we enjoyed a bluegrass band, entered a raffle for jars of her orange marmalade, and toured her house for the last time before it closed for annual restorative cleaning. I’ve lived in Gainesville for nearly seven years, and I’m writing my dissertation with Rawlings in mind, but this was the first time I drove the thirty minutes out to her house.
I don’t know why I put it off for so long. I have complicated feelings about Marge, and perhaps I was afraid that going into her house would make those feelings sharper; would humanize her in a way that would jeopardize my supposed objectivity about her work. Then again, perhaps I just didn’t feel like making the drive—it’s enough of a haul that I can usually come up with an excuse not to go. At any rate, on a hot morning in August I finally did it: wove through the mossy oaks and saw palms and slash pines to celebrate a writer I admire and distrust in equal measure.
Winding up the dirt path to her cracker-style home, I braced myself.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings moved to Florida in 1928, purchasing a small orange grove in Cross Creek as she embarked on her new career as a novelist. As with other writers across time she desired a neotranscendentalist, Thoreauean escape from the rapidly cosmopolitanizing urban north, seeking solace from postwar industrialism in Florida’s harsh, swampy interior. In a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald, she wrote: “I have probably been more cowardly than I’d admit in sinking my interests in the Florida backwoods, for the peace and beauty I’ve found there have definitely been an escape from the confusion of our generation.”
The oranges, she figured, would supplement her income as she tried her hand writing fiction, and she cranked out a handful of books—South Moon Under (1933), Golden Apples (1935), The Yearling (1938), and a memoir, Cross Creek (1942)—from her screened-in front porch beneath the pine trees and palm fronds. When The Yearling was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1939, she rocketed to fame and her name was solidified in the southern literary canon—which she disdained.
Rawlings wrote with an ethnographic hand, often accurately capturing and other times blatantly caricaturing her neighbors and employees. Try as she might, she was never able to fully shirk her educated suburban socialite, Virginian upbringing. Sometimes sympathetic and other times disparaging, she was always an outsider looking in, and her writing—later, her fame—introduced the nation to a version of Floridian (the Cracker) that still lingers in the collective conscious: poor, uneducated, socially unaware, willfully ignorant, and aggressively countercultural.
Still, her writing is beautiful. And brilliant. And moving. And full of sharp wit and humor. Just take this excerpt about her cow Dora from Cross Creek Cookery, which was read aloud to us as we cracked open containers of her mango ice cream:
“I sometimes think that, as the supreme sacrifice, I might give Dora to my country. She is irreplaceable. Her mother, old Laura, gave cream almost as thick, and Dora’s pretty heifer daughter Chrissie looks most promising, but Dora—and her cream—stand alone. She gives no great quantity of milk, her disposition is vile and we dislike each other, but I joyfully swap her the most expensive twenty-per-cent dairy feeds and allow her to nibble on my coral honeysuckles and my oranges, and raise fine cow-pea hay for her, in return for her cream. … When Dora is gone, God rest her wicked soul, and if Chrissie fails me, I think I shall not make or eat ice cream again, for there is no substitute for perfection. Probably Dora’s best ice creams are her mango, peach, and strawberry. Here the sweet massive cream blends with the subtle flavor of the fruit to make an ice cream so superlative that one becomes faint with ecstasy—or indigestion.”
There are reasons to like Rawlings’s writing—her technical talent for dialogue, her adeptness with metaphor, and her penchant for vibrantly describing the Florida landscape—and there are reasons to have real problems with it. There are starkly racist interludes, particularly when she’s writing about her housekeeper, Idella Parker. At times, there are undercurrents of narrative snobbery. There are moments where ethnography merges into extractivism and it’s easy to wonder just who she’s actually writing for. As I wiped sweat from my face and chewed on a frosty chunk of mango, I contemplated these criticisms, knowing I was just feet away from the table where all of those words were written.
The drive out to Cross Creek takes place mostly on a quiet two-lane road, which was broken up only by a group of teenagers fishing off the side of a bridge and a carrion bird picking the meat out of a dead possum. The land on either side of the road rolls on and on, interrupted occasionally by a wire fence or a small house. It’s easy to feel like you’re traveling through some kind of portal. Most of Florida is developed now; the groves are almost all gone, the waterfronts are clogged by overpriced condos, and historic buildings are torn down to make room for trendy bars where cocktails cost as much as they do in Manhattan.
Still, if you take the backroads, you can find places where the trees are wild, you seldom pass another car, the only beer in stock is domestic, and debris from a recent hurricane might stay there for years.
The walk up to Marjorie’s property is equally serene: Aside from a gaggle of yard chickens and the faint sounds of a banjo, the grounds were remarkably quiet. A few people milled about, looking inside her shed at her farm tools and taking pictures of her old plow. It wasn’t entirely hard to understand why she would choose the quiet and the solitude or why she would grow to be so enamored with the Florida backwoods. I’ve lived here almost all my life, minus three years, and even I was finding myself lulled by the strings of the double bass and the rustle of the trees. Even though it was my first time in Cross Creek, and I was raised in my own version of rapid gentrification in St. Pete, somehow—and I can’t really explain this—I felt like I was home.
After introductions were made, ice cream was eaten, and music was played, the house was opened for a tour. I smirked at the old pack of Lucky Strikes next to her typewriter and I envied her walls of bookshelves and velvet settee. I marveled at her kitchen, at her cookbook collection (The Perfect Hostess Cook Book, The Country Kitchen, 500 Recipes by Request, and The Oyster Book), and at the pantry packed so tightly with tools and nonperishables that you could barely turn around. All the while, volunteers regaled us with stories about the house—how the dining room chairs were positioned just so, so that you couldn’t see the outhouse; that her gas stove still works and is used for events.
I left Marjorie’s house empty-handed and relieved to be back in my air-conditioned car. I didn’t win the raffle for her marmalade and I didn’t swipe any of her cookbooks (though I was tempted, for research purposes). I don’t know that I felt any differently about her or her work, either: It’s still complicated. But what I did feel was a sense of connectedness to place, which is getting increasingly hard to find here among the high-rises, high prices, and loud noise.
Taking one last lap through her garden, I realized that Marjorie’s gift to us might not be her work at all—her complicated stories of destiny and precarity and vulnerability are fading from the collective consciousness, as some books are out of print and others are hardly read at all by contemporary readers. Instead, she established this place and left it in our care, where we can take a break from the confusion of our own generation; where we can eat a scoop of mango ice cream beneath the trees and listen for the whip-poor-wills.
Field notes: As Florida heals from two major hurricanes in just as many weeks and braces for more—we have a month left in the season—I’m reminded of the resiliency it takes to live in this place and find myself buoyed by the small acts of kindness I’ve seen in the past month. When I was evacuating from Irma, I saw a man pull a gun, probably out of panic, at a gas station. This time round, I saw a man climb out of his truck to go talk to the car behind him as they both waited at the gas pump, and then let her go ahead of him when he saw she had children in her car. I saw a friend of a friend lend someone a generator; a homeowner offer a drink to workers fixing his powerlines. I want to see more of this in the world, and I think it does exist if we open our eyes to it.
In other news, this post was partially inspired by my reception of my copy of When Southern Women Cook, a cookbook I contributed to for America’s Test Kitchen. I wrote about women rum runners, and the essay is sandwiched between a recipe for a rum runner cocktail and a bushwacker. Get a copy here!
Tasting notes: Here’s Marjorie’s recipe for mango ice cream, which you can find in Cross Creek Cookery:
3 cups mango pulp
1 cup boiled custard that’s been chilled
2 cups cream
3/4 cup sugar
Juice of 1 to 1 1/2 lemons
Marjorie suggests peeling 4 large Haden mangos and running them through a sieve to get a pulpy liquid. I think scooping out the meat and sending it through a food processor until smooth (though chunks make for a nice texture) would work fine. Pour the mango into a medium-sized bowl, then stir in the sugar and lemon juice, mix with custard, and fold in the cream until well incorporated. (If you’re not using custard, just use 3 cups of heavy cream). Adjust with more sugar or lemon to taste. Freeze. Before serving, remove from the freezer for 30 minutes or so to allow the ice cream to soften.
End notes: In 1943, Marjorie was sued for libel and invasion of privacy by her neighbor and friend Zelma Cason, who complained of the way Marjorie depicted her in an 84-word paragraph in Cross Creek. The case, now called “the Cross Creek Trial,” was the first time invasion of privacy was tried in a Florida court and the first time the charge was levied against an author in the United States. Cason was represented by Kate Walton, a graduate of the University of Florida’s law school and one of the first five women to be admitted to the Florida Bar. The judge sided with Marjorie, but she lost on appeal and was ordered to pay Cason $1 (as opposed to the $100,000 Cason sought). Devastated by the ordeal, Marjorie never wrote about Florida or Cross Creek again.
Loved reading this (and everything you write)!
Love this! 🥭🥭🥭
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