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Michael McLeod
Thanks MM
I know I'm hogging space today but I am going through old clips and thought everybody might like this obituary I co-wrote a long time ago.everybody is familiar with "The Yearling," I think - Marjorie Kinnan Rawling's classic story of a little boy and his pet deer, Flag.
It was set in Florida, in a rural area, filled with beautiful lakes and still called Cross Creek, that is not far from where I live in Orlando. The obit is about a woman who was surely a friend of Rawlings and likely had more to do with The Yearling than we know. A "cracker" is a reference to a countryfied person - It's been so long I am not sure if that term is a southernism or we used it in Ohio.
I love that first quote I got from the old sheriff.
Perhaps she was the last of the Florida Crackers. Perhaps she was simply one of a kind.
Dessie Prescott was an irrepressible woman. She hunted antelope, killed a bear, built a log cabin at the age of 19, ran a hog farm, learned to fly airplanes, joined the Army, owned her own fishing lodge, married six men -- "four of them doctors," she liked to brag -- and helped inspire a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.
She was, says a longtime friend, former Citrus County Sheriff Charles Dean, "an individualistic lady, back before that sort of thing became popular."
She died of cancer late Friday at 95 at her rustic home on the backwaters of the Withlacoochee River. She had lived life with gusto but never sought fame, which is why only a circle of friends and scholars knew of her friendship with author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings -- and the part Prescott played in inspiring two of the greatest literary tributes to the natural beauty of Florida.
It was Rawlings who won praise for Cross Creek, a 1942 memoir of life in the Florida scrub. It was Rawlings who earned the Pulitzer Prize in 1939 for The Yearling, a tender portrait of a young boy named Jody and his all-too-fleeting friendship with a deer named Flag. But it was Prescott who made it all possible.
If it weren't for Prescott, there would be no Yearling -- and there would be no Cross Creek, said Rawlings scholar and author David Nolan.
2 NORTHERNERS ARRIVE
Prescott was living in Cross Creek, a poor, rural lakeside community near Gainesville, in 1928. Its residents -- who survived by fishing, hunting, tending orange groves and planting kitchen gardens -- were taken aback that year by the arrival of two Northerners who knew absolutely nothing about any of those things.
Marjorie Rawlings and her husband, Charles, had bought a 72-acre farm in Cross Creek. Fifty-two acres were planted with orange trees, 20 in pecans. The two aspiring writers planned to live off the proceeds of the groves and write novels and essays in their spare time.
This was such a patently ridiculous idea -- the profit margin for oranges that year was 8 cents a bushel -- that other residents of the Creek were embarrassed to have to explain it. They begged Dessie, who could get along with anyone, to help out the newcomers, lest they starve.
"They would have, too," she once said.
Prescott took Marjorie under her wing. She taught her to hunt. She introduced her to the area's flora and fauna, not to mention its eminently potent moonshine. She paved the way for Marjorie to not only survive the scrub, but to fall in love with it. One of the results was a literary masterpiece. No one before or since has captured the unforgiving but irresistible beauty of the Florida of that time and place as Rawlings did in The Yearling.
Critics suspect that Rawlings funneled a good deal of Prescott's love of the land and plainspoken charm into the novel. "It wouldn't surprise me at all if Marjorie added a little of Dessie to Jody's character," Nolan said.
But it was Rawlings' memoir, Cross Creek, that immortalized Prescott most directly.
The book included a chapter about a 10-day journey the women took down the St. Johns and Ocklawaha rivers in 1933.
During the trip, Prescott carried a revolver on one hip, a bowie knife on the other. The women used an 18-foot wooden boat powered by a tiny, 3-horsepower engine to wend their way through the untamed and unpredictable waterway, traveling by day, camping by night in abandoned cabins.
"If I could have, to hold forever, one brief place and time of beauty, I think I might choose the night on that high lonely bank above the St. Johns River," Rawlings wrote of one such evening. "Suddenly the soft night turned silver. The moon was rising. We lay on our cots a long time, wakeful because of beauty. The moon shone through the doorways and windows, and the light was patterned with the shadows of Spanish moss waving from the live oaks. There was a deserted grove somewhere behind the cabin, and the incredible sweetness of orange bloom drifted across us."
PRESCOTT NEVER INTIMIDATED
Prescott, who had a lifelong habit of calling older friends "young 'un," did the same with Rawlings, who was several years her senior. She was never intimidated by her famous literary friend, though she was envious of her way with words. "Marge could describe a magnolia and I could smell it," she liked to say.
Rawlings, for her part, wondered what on Earth a woman as self-sufficient as Prescott saw in her.
"Why Dessie wants a sissie like me, I'll never know," she once wrote to a friend, "except that she loves to eat and knows I can whip up a good meal on the Sahara or the Siberian tundra. Also, she can boss me."
Theirs was not a storybook friendship. Prescott felt abandoned when Rawlings, fearing negative publicity, refused to testify on her behalf in a bitter divorce trial, but she was too loyal to let the animosity linger. She never seemed to have time for such things.
A few years later, in 1946, Rawlings was sued by a Cross Creek resident, Zelma Cason, over how Cason was portrayed in Cross Creek. Now the shoe was on the other foot. Rawlings needed Prescott to testify on her behalf in a jury trial to settle the $100,000 lawsuit. Prescott agreed -- but only if Rawlings would call her and ask her personally for the favor. She did.
Rawlings had written that Cason resembled an angry canary. Prescott took the stand and told the judge it was a pretty accurate comparison. Rawlings, in a victory, wound up having to make a token payment of a few dollars to Cason.
Even apart from her relationship with a literary legend, Prescott was a remarkable person. She was born Aug. 4, 1906, in Island Grove, a hamlet in Alachua County. She started hunting when she was 5 years old, charging through the scrub after birds the grownups had shot. "My uncle said even at the age of 5 or 7 that I was the best bird dog, the best retriever he ever owned. And why I never got bit by a rattlesnake, I'll never know," she said.
As a young woman, she saved money by working at diners in Florida and New Jersey, parlaying a flashing smile into tips, and she used what she made to build a log cabin and hunting camp on property in Florida that was given her by an uncle. Later, she operated the Withlacoochee River Lodge off U.S. Highway 19 in Citrus County, a rustic haven for outdoor enthusiasts from all over the country.
She earned a commercial pilot's license before anyone had heard of Amelia Earhart. She was a deadeye shot, once killing a bear that ventured too close to her cabin, and hunting antelope in Africa with the last of her husbands, Howard Prescott, who owned gold mines in the West. He took her on four safaris and shared her love of the outdoors. He died several years ago, the only husband she never divorced.
Prescott remained vigorous into her early 90s. "The world is my oyster, and I spent my life cracking it," she would tell her friends. She hobbled around, using a tomato stake as a cane, reminiscing about Rawlings and telling stories of her own.
As she grew older, she came to accept the inevitable. She once told Dean, the former Citrus County sheriff: "If I can't be what I want to be or do what I want to do anymore -- well, hellfire, Charlie, I'm ready to get gone."
So she did, asking to be sent home from the hospital after taking a turn for the worse a few weeks ago, dying on her own terms in her rustic country home of 35 years on the backwaters of the Withlacoochee River.
She was tended by her stepdaughter, Amy Gilbert, and her friend and caregiver for the past 19 years, Candy Booth.
A week ago, Booth rolled Prescott into the living room. She sat upright in her bed in a shaft of an afternoon sun that streamed in through the window. Outside, on the untainted 60-acre property, the Florida landscape was much the same as it was when Dessie was a girl. The magnolias were a week away from blooming. Cows grazed in a distant pasture. The inky blue waters of Lake Rousseau were ringed by cypress, pine and cabbage palms.
But Dessie Prescott was somewhere else. Booth saw a smile on her face.
"What are you thinking, to make you smile like that?" she asked.
The old woman turned to her, still beaming, eyes shining.
"A thousand memories," she whispered.
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