aboard her houseboat. She wrote to Marjorie: ‘‘Twenty-one guns!...‘Cross
Creek’...isamostremarkable piece of work....Whetheritpleases you or
not, you are my sister. You look at plants and animals and people in the way I
do. You are conscious of the three layers of life, instead of the obvious thing
before your nose.’’ Zora declared her special admiration for Marjorie’s treat-
ment of Cross Creek’s black folks. ‘‘Youlookedat them,’’ she wrote, ‘‘and
saw them as they are, instead of slobbering over them as all of the other au-
thors do.’’ Zora hated ‘‘that black-face minstrel patter,’’ still so common in
white writing, and thought Marjorie had understood the ‘‘linguistic heiro-
gliphics’’ of Afro-southern speech. A bit later, Zora invited Marjorie down to
stay on her boat and, on another occasion, offered to come to Cross Creek to
look after her while Marjorie’s maid was on vacation. Marjorie probably did
not get to the houseboat, but Zora was a guest at Cross Creek at least once.^28
Neither woman seems to have written about the long, overnight visit.
Idella Parker, a bright, educated woman and former schoolteacher, did,
however, much, much later. Parker (who was African American) published
two books about her decade-long association with Marjorie:Marjorie Raw-
lings’ ‘‘Perfect Maid’’() andFrom Reddick to Cross Creek(). In the
first book, Parker wrote, ‘‘Imagine this now! Here was a black author who
had come to visit Mrs. Rawlings and had been treated like an equal all day
long, talking, laughing, and drinking together on the porch for all the world
to see. But when it came to spending the night, Zora would be sent out to
sleep with the servants.’’ She insisted, too, that Marjorie had no other guests
and that there were two empty bedrooms in her house.^29
Rawlings was indeed an imperfect ‘‘pioneer’’ (her term) against the color
line, as Hurston’s latest biographers and others have observed. Zora praised
Marjorie’s appreciation for rural black speech, yet writing to Max Perkins
once, Marjorie ridiculed the pronunciation of a substitute maid. There is
other stereotyping in her letters, too. Yet during the late s and s—
if we are to believe other letters, most to friends and relations—she risked
the disapproval of neighboring landowners by paying not only maids but
farmhands and pickers more than the low local standard. Marjorie her-
self acknowledged a sometimes difficult relationship with Idella Parker, al-
though it seems clear from both women’s writing, Parker’s so long after
Rawlings’s death, that they felt dear to each other. As for Zora, she was a
genius at negotiating the color lines of all sections of the country, not least
her native one, and her extant letters contain not a word of rebuke or dis-
approval of Marjorie Rawlings.
So-called race relations is not exactly our subject here—except that har-
avery
(avery)
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