most impenetrable jungles swarming with snakes, including three species
of vipers (rattlers, moccasins, and coral snakes), bears, and a few surviving
panthers and alligators. (These last two species had been hunted almost
to extinction by the s, and wolves had been exterminated long before.)
Marjorie went forth on horseback, as companion-assistant to the cen-
sus taker, to meet and ultimately to know the swamp folk. She became
friends with a ‘‘cracker’’ family, stayed in their cabin for extended periods,
and learned to catch and cook turtles, hunt bear, and fish among the snakes
and ’gators. The crackers lived from their gardens, the hunt, and fishing.
They also grew some corn, which the men converted to whiskey and sold for
cash money. This was illegal everywhere in the South for most of the twenti-
eth century, so cracker men were often in hiding from sheriffs or in prison.
Marjorie thought them nearly all admirably self-reliant, noble of sentiment
and purpose, and irresistibly romantic; from them she made much of her
fiction and more. She studied, then re-created in prose, the past in natu-
ral context, a dynamic rustic ecology that had been common through the
seventeenth, eighteenth, and most of the nineteenth centuries, but one
that hardly existed in the twentieth, except in comparably swampy, railroad-
less locales northward and westward, near the Atlantic and Gulf coasts,
and in famously ‘‘primitive’’ spots of Appalachia and the Ozarks. Rawlings
became an important nature writer (although she has seldom been recog-
nized as such), not unlike her contemporary William Faulkner, in that her
wild natural places have humans and human narratives in them, people
and stories naturally, as it were, inplace.
tNature without humans has manifest intrinsic value, to be sure, to hu-
man visitors who return to civilization: There are beauty gentle and awe-
some and a capacity for self-renewal in aftermaths of even colossal natural
disasters. Humans have made their way for at least million years, how-
ever, as members of the natural community everywhere on earth save Ant-
arctica, and recently even there. Their objective has ever been the manage-
ment of landscapes of every sort. For nature is sublime in the true meaning
of the word—magnetically alluring yet dangerously wild, indifferent, and
unpredictable. Humans must have shelter and food, and they achieve these
through violence. Fire has ever been essential, destroying patches or great
swaths of trees so people might establish sustaining gardens and also, for
a very long time, big crop fields. The latter fed work animals, made huge
bounties of corn so that whiskey might be distilled, or produced fiber to
cover and protect human bodies. Not least, violence, especially fire, per-