cian in Los Angeles who responded generously to Zora’s requests for loans,
she had little luck. She died at last in Fort Pierce, in yet another rented
place. Loving friends and neighbors buried her but never got around to set-
ting a memorial stone. This came later, along with new appreciation from
literary academics and a new generation of readers. In the meantime, poor
Zora’s heroic landscaping and gardening, both provisioning and ornamen-
tal, remind one of the heroism and determination of countless tenant and
sharecropper women, feeding families, improving garden soils, and beau-
tifying others’ places.
The last of my literary gardeners is Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (–
), who knew and, like everyone, loved Zora Neale Hurston, from their
first meetings in . It was a strange, wonderful, and awful year for both
women. The United States was at last in the new World War, and Marjorie’s
new husband, Norton Baskin, a St. Augustine hotelier, would soon depart
for South Asia as a volunteer ambulance driver. Zora was already driving
—across North America, giving up on Paramount and screenwriting and
heading for Florida, her old refuge. Her vivid memoir,Dust Tracks on a
Road, would appear toward the end of the year, but for now she was nearly
broke, and there was a summer teaching opportunity at the Florida Nor-
mal and Industrial College in St. Augustine. Marjorie’s luminous autobio-
graphical essays,Cross Creek, copyrighted in , along withCross Creek
Cookery, were on their way into print.Cross Creekbecame a best seller, and
the witty cookbook apparently sold quite well, too. But one of the chapters
inCross Creekwould give offense to a neighborhood woman with whom
Marjorie had ridden on horseback to take the federal census years before.
Her lawsuit dragged on, expensively, for years, before Marjorie finally lost
an appeal and paid a nominal fine. Still, in her life was busy and satis-
fying. She was often away from Cross Creek, her orange grove, and her gar-
den. She stayed with Norton atop the hotel; she kept a summer cottage at
Crescent Beach, a few miles south of St. Augustine; and she bought and re-
stored another summer house in upstate New York, for when she needed a
cool northern respite from Florida’s almost endless summer heat. And too,
throughout the s she enjoyed the services and companionship of her
favorite maid, Idella Parker, who minded not only her house but the yard
and the plants.
One day during the summer of , in the meantime, Marjorie came by
Florida Normal to give one of her frequent talks at the little institution for
blacks. There she met Zora, whose work was well known to her, and the two
women seemed instantly to have taken to each other. Marjorie invited Zora