The Jessamine Cometh

And robins appeared at the farm today.

This week I saw the first bloom of Carolina jessamine. I was walking the mile to our mailbox when I came upon a tiny golden trumpet hanging above the road at eye level. January 15 is too early even for the jessamine.

It also happened this week that I pulled out my copy of Cross Creek by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, author of The Yearling, and went skimming through it. I was looking for an example of craft that I could use as a mini-lesson in my Love & Accountability Circle (a group of writers working on longer writing projects.) I wanted to talk about Rawlings’s impulse to use multiple senses, not simply seeing, in describing a thing.

I came upon a passage, in the chapter “Spring at the Creek,” about jessamine.

If anything comes first, it is the jessamine. Along the fence rows, through the hammocks, slim dry vines are suddenly a mass of golden bloom, so fragrant that the initiate all but swoons. Like many tropical flowers, the jessamine is most potent in the night time. I have been on Orange Lake by night and had the scent of the jessamine come so strongly from the far shores that it seemed an immense perfume flask had been spilled from the stars….The jessamine is at its height, spilling waterfalls of gold from high in the tallest trees…

I’ve thought of jessamine as “cascading,” but I’ve never thought of it as “waterfalls.” That’s priceless.

As I was reading, I began pay close attention to Rawlings’s treatment of people of color. I have been determined not to label Cross Creek as a racist book and instead as one that fell victim to a culture in which it was written, but when I re-read passages of it again this week a powerful disappointment overcame me.

I say “disappointment” because early on I was heavily influenced by the work of Rawlings. I recognized myself in characters like the boy Jody and also in Rawlings herself, and I recognized my geography in Cross Creek, named for the place she lived in north Florida. In that book Rawlings describes anoles, small reptiles that I encountered daily as a child. I called them lizards or sometimes chameleons because they change color depending on the substrate on which they rest. “They are partial to a warm bed that a human has slept in and expects to sleep in again that night,” she wrote.

Hawthorne or Bronte never mentioned anoles. Anoles were my world.

Cross Creek was my world, then, canonized. Rawlings woke something in me. What she taught me was that my southern Georgia world could also be a literary world.

That was immensely helpful.

I don’t want Rawlings’s work to be racist. Or classist. But it is. Deeply. And that makes me deeply sad.

I am not, however, giving up on it. Her writing, especially about place, is breath-taking and evocative; it sears itself permanently into the mind; it is among the best I’ve ever read. As a woman writing about nature, she is a powerful feminist role-model. Her boat trip down the St. Johns River with her friend Dessie is unbelievable—two independent women in the 1930s camping alone on sandbars.

That was the life I wanted.

Remember that Rawlings was a northerner. She went south, purchased an orange grove in the vicinity of sleepy Cross Creek, and began to live there. She entertained many visitors from the north, and she herself traveled north often. If her books are a product of a culture, then the north has to figure even more dramatically than the south in what she produced. She was observing her new territory, yes, but her sensibilities were decidedly northern.

This past week I felt like a censor as I read her. I imagined drawing thick black blocks through words, sentences, and even entire passages.

I believe that the purpose of story is to serve the evolution of human consciousness. A story should push all of us along. We are born on to a planet teeming with millions of stories. Some of those have taken over and become a dominant paradigm, and often the dominant paradigm is an oppressive one.

Our job is to populate the world with stories of justice and goodwill until finally oppressive paradigms topple.

The nature of evolution, of course, ensures that the stories I/we write today may be found lacking in times to come. Perhaps I will be derided years from now that I wrote about driving, when I knew that fossil fuels were disrupting the environment and destroying the biosphere.

Our job is to unwrap the stories that are handed to us and to do our best thinking to use them judiciously. And to pay better stories forward.

I wish Rawlings could come back to earth and edit Cross Creek, or I wish she could send me a message from the grave and ask me to do it. Because I would. Gladly.

Then I could, without a bit of hesitation, embrace this beautiful book.

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My Copy of Cross Creek

In 2017 a package from Florida arrived in my mailbox. In it was a book, a vintage copy of Cross Creek. The book alone was a wonderful gift, but there was more to the story.

Janisse—I found this book in a thrift shop in Fernandina Beach. As soon as I saw the library it came from, I thought perhaps you may have checked it out as a child. It is a sweet old copy of a wonderful book…enjoy! I work at the Ordway Swisher Biological Station. When I started in 2007, you gave a talk at the Florida Native Plant Conference (you signed my book!) Ten years later and I have grown to know and love this place. If you are ever in the area, it would be my pleasure and honor to show it to you. I have a small farm in Alachua, you are always welcome. Best wishes—Lisa

The book is a 1942 copy of Cross Creek. It is stamped BAXLEY PUBLIC LIBRARY. Baxley, Georgia is my hometown. In the back of the book is a “Date Due” slip. The book was first checked out in 1966, and the eleventh and final time it was checked out was July 28, 1975. I want to believe that was me. I would have been 13.

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A Word about Long Covid

My friend Jeff Dwyer of Northampton, Mass., who was my agent a long time ago, sent me this short and sobering video about why we should try not to get Covid-19. It’s from cardiologist Rae Duncan, who weeps at one point while thinking about one of her patients. When I opened our local newspaper this week, two of the obituaries were for young men. With a quick search I was able to find out that the man in his late 20s died by gun violence. All I know about the other man, 36, is that he died at home. All of this gives me great pause.

Mercury is Retrograde

This past week has been unusually tumultuous emotionally, especially in the area of relationships with extended family. I was recently listening to a podcast about relationship resilience—that means that a disagreement happens between two people, they talk it through, and their relationship continues and maybe even strengthens. I’m more of a banana split than a trampoline! I’d rather sneak out the back door.

Some of the tumult was small. For example, my newly grown daughter and her friend wanted me to buy them pizzas. We agreed on what they could order. I drove them to the pizzaria and passed them my credit card. When they came out with their food all bagged up my daughter handed back the credit card. “Where’s the receipt?” I asked. One of them said, “They didn’t give us one” at the same time that the other one said, “In my pocket.” When I looked at the receipt, they had changed the order and had spent $77.50.

I put on my darkest sunglasses and my reddest lipstick, then turned this song as high as I could.

The song is Randall Bramblett playing “I’ve Got Faith in You.” (They borrowed Duane Allman’s Gibson SG, and Tommy Talton is playing slide on it.) American Songwriter is featuring the tune on their website, and you can listen to it for free there. Scroll to the bottom.

I learned from astrology friends that currently Mercury, the planet, is in retrograde, or to be grammatically correct, Mercury is retrograde. What that actually means I do not know. I googled, “Is Mercury in retrograde?”

Even my husband Raven, who thumbs his nose at woo-woo, said, “Maybe there’s something to the Mercury stuff.”

I hope your life right now is happily happening miles away from mercurial weirdness, but if it, like mine, includes some craziness, then let’s look forward to Wednesday! As Randall sings, “Someday these clouds will all blow through.”