Preserving The Hammock In Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’S When the Whippoorwill (1940)

This chapter examines the short stories in Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s When the Whippoorwill (1940), which fictionalize the rural Florida Cracker community, Cross Creek, in the 1930s. Writing from both the perspective of participant (resident at Cross Creek) and observer (a writer depicting a region’s culture to convey universal meaning), Rawlings envisions herself as an ethnographer, determined to portray a way of life through literary representations that convey its beauty to readers. Her selection and arrangement of four previously published magazine stories progressively positions the female Florida Cracker character’s voice—represented by Drenna in “Crop of Beans,” Florry in “Jacob’s Ladder,” Mattie Syles in “Gal Young ‘Un,” and Quincey Dover in “Cocks Must Crow”—at the center of a community’s interdependence and resiliency. These stories convey Rawlings’s efforts to preserve the Florida hammock and its inhabitants.