Content area
Full Text
In Cross Creek, her book about central Florida published in 1942, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings remarked on the similarities between herself and Ideila Parker: "She is ... as good a cook as I, well educated, with almost my own tastes in literature and movies."1 In 1992 Parker wrote in her memoir that Rawlings "was a human being, with human faults and troubles, and so am L In their words written half a century apart, the women sought to find common ground with one another. Their attempts were made more difficult because they were white and African American, living in the Jim Crow South, and because of the nature of their relationship. Parker worked as Rawlings's cook between 1940 and 1950, and the hierarchical character of their connection rendered genuine friendship impossible.
For ten years, Parker and Rawlings were almost daily presences in one another's lives, living amid Rawlings's orange grove in Cross Creek, Florida. When Parker came to work in October 1940, Rawlings had just won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Yearling (1938) and was a national celebrity. Parker, with a teaching degree from BethuneCookman Academy, was an excellent cook, capable of meeting almost any employer's highest standards. Although both of them were romantically involved with men, their male partners did not live at Cross Creek during this time, making the grove a largely female enclave, and both were childless. If ever an employer and employee had a chance for legitimate connection, surely Rawlings and Parker did. But, as their writings demonstrate, the complexities of both race and class trumped gender in determining their relationship. With their large collections of writing, Parker and Rawlings provide parallel accounts of how race and class divided women in the last years of the Jim Crow South.
Both Rawlings and Parker strove to live by their own dictates, and to some extent, both succeeded. Bom in Washington, D.C, and educated at the University of Wisconsin, Rawlings moved to the orange groves of central Florida with her first husband in 1928 and began writing about the region. When she and Charles Rawlings divorced in 1933, Marjorie Rawlings chose to remain in rural north central Florida. She retained control of the property as a feme sole and lived in the...