Self-sovereignty and invasion: serializing a section of "A Man or a Mother"

I'm writing a book about the invasion of privacy case my great aunt Kate Walton litigated against Florida icon Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. The next 9 Sundays will share a chapter from a timely section.

In spring 1942, just after America entered World War II, iconic Pulitzer prize-winning Florida writer Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings included her former friend Zelma Cason — without Zelma’s knowledge or permission — in her highly-anticipated and then best-selling book Cross Creek. She described Zelma like this.

Zelma is an ageless spinster resembling an angry and efficient canary. She manages her orange grove and as much of the village and country as needs management or will submit to it. I cannot decide whether she should have been a man or a mother. She combines the more violent characteristics of both and those who ask for or accept her manifold ministrations think nothing of being cursed loudly at the very instant of being tenderly fed, clothed, nursed or guided though their troubles.

Zelma objected. She sued Marjorie, alleging libel and invasion of privacy. My great aunt Kate Walton and great grandfather Judge Vertrees (J.V.) Walton represented Zelma. I’ve been writing a book about this almost famous lawsuit for a long, long time — more than 15 years now.

My first book, Age of Barbarity: the forgotten fight the soul of Florida, actually emerged from my Cross Creek case research. A Man or a Mother is a sequel, or a continuation, with overlapping characters. Back in 2020, I posted the article below as a sort of trailer.

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"A man or a mother": the women and invasions of Florida's most profound lawsuit

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One personal De-Shittification goal is to finish a draft of the book by the end of 2025. And I can finally start to see the finish line. I recently finished a section I called “Self-sovereignty and Invasion (1933-1942).” World War II, as experienced in Florida, especially northeast Florida, which was literally a war zone in 1942, is a huge character in this section — and in the book itself.

Starting today, I’m serializing the “Self-sovereignty and invasion” section, one chapter at a time, on Sundays.

One note about structure and style: each section in the book starts with a dramatized/fictionalized accounts of real events, mixing fact and conjecture. I’m very explicit, in my narrative voice, about what I know and where I’m playing around with imagination. Narration itself is an important character in this story.

The “Self-sovereignty and invasion” section opens with a real, clearly-dated event of war violence, wrapped in a fictionalized martial sex comedy. That’s because sex (actual sex, sexuality, and sexual identity/gender) mingles with war and narration as the lead conceptual characters of A Man or a Mother. So, fair warning: the dramatized part is mildly NSFW. It flows into the first real chapter of the section, titled: “It’s always 1933 and 1940 and 1942 and 2024.”

You won’t get every reference until you buy the final book. But you should be able to enjoy and understand these stories without having every available context.

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April 10, 1942

Jacksonville Beach, FL

All the vacationers had seen an impressive special performance at Roosevelt’s expense. A burning tanker, artillery fire, the silhouette of a U-boat – how often had all of that been seen in America? – Reinhard Hardegan, commander of German U-boat 123, describing his sinking of the Gulfamerica, a brand new American tanker ship.

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The United Press article doesn’t tell me the newly consummated Mrs. McCollum’s first name – only that she’s honeymooning with husband “R.” So let’s call her Mary. We’ll call him Robert. These were the most popular American names for girls and boys at the time of their births in the 1920s.

A generation later, at the start of World War II, they still were.

I wager Mary and Robert are staying at the Atlantic Beach Hotel, which rises up from the base of the Jacksonville Beach pier. It’s the hospitable bow on the ribbon of bright light stretching in either direction along the bustling boardwalk and beach house-topped dunes.

Playful backlight for a war zone.

What are newlyweds doing in a beach resort hotel at 10:20 p.m. on a Friday night of their honeymoon? They could be dancing and cavorting and drinking with the newly mobilized soldiers and sailors training at Jacksonville’s Camp Blanding and Naval Air Station enjoying weekend liberty at the pier and boardwalk.

But I suspect they’re cavorting with each other, away from the tumult. The entire Cross Creek trial story turns on sex and war and marriage. So let’s combine them for a moment.

It’s good to be young, wed, and naked – although perhaps better for Robert than Mary at this moment.

“Dearest …”

“Yes, my love.”

“That was very nice. Again.”

“Yes.”

“But …”

“But?”

“Are we, am I, doing something wrong, maybe?”

“What?”

“I think something else is supposed to happen.”

Robert rolled toward her.

“No, no, Mary,” he said tenderly. “What do you mean? Everything happened. It’s like heaven with you.”

Mary smiled. “You’re very sweet … It’s all just very new for me.”

That time that college boy back home touched her under her skirt something else had happened. She remembered a flash of heat, her joints sort of losing function, and the painfully-muffled noise she had never made before or since.

It was involuntary, consuming, shocking … and better – even though it wasn’t really sex, was it? And she still imagined herself whorish, three years later. She had done what whores do with a stranger who noticed the book she was reading.

Robert must never know about it. She hadn’t even confessed it to the gross old priests, who she did not trust, and who she knew would feel lust just hearing about it.

In a few moments of longing since, she thought to recreate the sensation for herself, like whores do, but the icy contempt in her fingers always stopped her.

Mary admonished herself for bringing the distant boy and those past sensations into her marital bed – on her honeymoon. And yet, 11 times in four days in that marital bed had delivered only anticipation without detonation – a mildly enjoyable earthly purgatory.

What was wrong?

“I can tell when I’m with you, the way your body receives me, the way we move together, we’ll have a baby on the way in no time. Maybe we already do.” Robert dropped into a slightly sordid voice: “I mean. We’ve been busy.”

The idea of a baby kicked in the very spot the baby itself could be living its first moments. And Mary’s gut fell like she’d been pushed from a cliff – or jumped.

Thrill and happy terror and the sound of beach waves through the open window, all of which her husband had given her, overwhelmed, for now, that which he had not.

Yes, she did want what only that nameless boy had ever given her. But she wanted it from her husband, with whom she could make whatever noise she felt compelled to make, with whom she could be creating a baby right now, at this very moment, swaddled by the perfect night ocean air of early April Florida.

And then …

Detonation.

The flash came first, like the smoke from a distant cannon. The thunder came quickly behind it, rattling the windows and walls.

“What the hell?”

Robert threw the sheet off and moved quickly to the window in time to see a second flash. A second blast wave roared through.

“Robert, cover yourself up.”

***

If I die in this fucking rowboat that fucking traitor made me pay $5 for, Mary is gonna be having sex and babies with some other man.

That realization stung as badly as the whole misadventure.

It was dawn now. The light rising in the east illuminated the pillar of black smoke rising from the shoreline to the west. It was enormous, but small.

“Goddam, I’m a long way out,” Robert said out loud to nothing but himself and ocean.

He kept reconstructing the compounding nightmarish absurdities.

Rushing down to the ocean covered in sex and a pair of swim shorts and a beach shirt. The ship burning. That thing, the U-boat or whatever, moving between the shore and the burning ship, surrounded by lillypads of fire, unloading shells into the defenseless hull. Kraut murderer.

Watching the shell flowers explode in succession, imagining the men he couldn’t see cooked alive. That’s what sent Robert to the boat man – who demanded he rent it.

“What do you mean? This is war. There are men dying out there.”

“Yes, and war will burn up my boat. You expect me to indulge your patriotism without compensation, sir?”

“Mary go get me $5 so I can pay this bastard.”

“What?”

“Go,” he yelled.

He’d never yelled at her like that before; and he lamented its necessity. But she ran back through the sand, into the hotel. He stood there stupidly, waiting silently, wanting to thrash the boat man, but needing his boat. Mary returned after just a few moments with the bill. He snatched it from her.

“Robert. What are you doing?”

“Paying this son-of-a-bitch so I can help.”

“Look here, mister, how about I don’t give it to you at all.”

Robert just handed him the money and pulled the boat toward the water and the fire.

“Be careful, please, darling.”

Past the breakers, the wind and receding tide took over. Robert couldn’t generate enough physical force to control the boat. Couldn’t stop or even really change direction. The U-boat was gone. The fire raged. Men called to him from the water, dodging the floating carpets of flame.

And Robert couldn’t make the fucking oars make the fucking boat deviate as he drifted on past the scene, feeling the heat rise on his face and then fall as he drifted into night.

Mile after dark mile followed, with the giant torch of the ship receding bit-by-bit with the curvature of the Earth. Robert heard the warplanes over head, hunting the U-boat as impotently as he drifted, lightless below with the wind.

Even if they find me, they’re taking a plane from the hunt – and rescue.

That hurt to realize, too.

He would never tell Mary about this feeling if he ever saw her again. What kind of man needs to be saved from war because he can’t row a boat?

Splash. The oars went in the water, unhooked from their mechanisms. That traitor sold me a bum boat, Mary.

As he watched them sink, he saw a boat in the distance, the first of the morning. It was headed toward him from the coast. Robert refused to debase himself by waving madly; but it didn’t matter. It was coming right for him.

He wasn’t going to die in this defective boat after all.

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It’s always 1933 and 1940 and 1942 and 2024

The real-life germ of the McCollum story comes from a little excerpt from a United Press article that ran in the April 15, 1942 edition of the Tampa Tribune (where I worked for two years very near the end of its existence.)

Among those who sought to aid in rescue work R. McCollum, who was honeymooning. He rented a rowboat for $5 and was carried out to sea by the wind and tide. A search, started by his frantic bride, ended with his rescue by a patrol boat late Saturday afternoon. He had drifted 20 miles of the coast.

The shore was not blacked out until 40 minutes after the attack. A defense council member said: “We couldn’t order the blackout without an army order, but once we got it we had everything blacked out within three minutes.”

The headline on the article is:

Shore Watchers See U-Boat Sink Two Ships In Atlantic

20 Lost; But 68 Are Saved and Brought to Jacksonville

Presumably because of war-time censorship, the article itself never says where the two ships in question were sunk. The dateline is Jacksonville; but the description is just an “East Coast community.” The Gulfamerica is not named; but the headline notes survivors were brought to Jacksonville.

It’s hard to imagine what the War Department thought it was accomplishing other than making itself look silly in print. But that performative, feckless censorship is quite consistent with the entire U.S. effort to combat the “Atlantic Pearl Harbor” of 1942.

By April, when my fictionalized McCollums had traveled to Jacksonville Beach for their honeymoon, America was fighting a formally declared war. Eastern coastal America — including Florida — and the Caribbean saw a ruthlessly effective German U-Boat offensive on vital shipping.

For someone living in or visiting north Florida, the Gulfamerica’s fiery death by torpedo and shelling – and the mocking impunity with which U-123 executed it for an audience of shore gawkers— likely delivered the bleakest vibe moment of the entire war.

***

But Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and her super editor Max Perkins¹, by now dear friends and pen pals, were already deeply gloomy about the future of American self-government well before the Germans brought the war in sight of Marjorie’s Crescent Beach cabin.

Consider this bracing exchange from July 1940, just after the fall of France and a few days into the Battle of Britain. Marjorie had written a patriotic article; but she wasn’t really feeling it, as she told Max:

When your note came, saying that you liked the article, I was about to wire you telling you it wouldn’t do at all. I am not satisfied with it, yet it is the best I could do. There are so many things that I feel that had no place in such an article—that democracy, actually, is a failure—and the very individual and national and racial greed and selfishness make the whole outlook entirely hopeless.

The only point I could emphasize was that we do really believe, whether we practice it or not, in a basic kindliness, and consideration for the rights of the individual. It’s probably time to begin preaching, a la Ortega, the responsibilities and obligations of the individual! We’ve all been concerned with what we thought was coming to us, rather than what we could contribute to the general welfare.

Max wrote this back to her:

I must say I myself feel desperate about democracy. You cannot have it without a very strong sense of the thing now detested, “duty” and a sense that material success is a lower form than that of service. These things got to be regarded as hypocrisy, and I suppose the truth is people became hypocritical about them. But they were not that in my boyhood. The Yankees really believed them. We always were taught that in a community like Windsor, the truly important men were the school teacher, the newspaper editor, and the clergyman. The doctor too was more respected than the business man. These people were supposed to have made a sacrifice because they cared more to serve their professions and what they meant, than for money. I know that my father [a lawyer], who practiced in New York and never made more than a good living for a big family out of it, nor left a penny, always thought he was doing something more important than that, that he was advancing the idea of justice.

That came just weeks after a June 1940 exchange of letters between Kate Walton and her cousin J.J. Gray Jr., a prominent Nashville-based industrialist. Gray was actively discouraging his “Little Pard” Kate in her quest to join the allied war effort, perhaps as an ambulance driver. Sadly, I do not possess Kate’s side of this exchange. I’ve excerpted Gray below:

June 11:

I can understand how a young person like you wants to get in and do your bit, but Kate the main thing is to first look after your dear ones and this you could not do if you were over there. I know that not only your Father and office depend on you, but also your Mother and the other girls, so I think it would be a big mistake for you to leave them.

June 17:

Now, “Little Pard,” I am not going to try help you get a job over there, for I know beyond doubt that it is your duty to stay there and run everything just as you have done in the last few years. Anyhow, Kate, we have waited so long to even talk about doing anything that if Germany whips the British and the French any time between now and the cold weather, they will be right over here and get us. They won’t wait for us to get ready. Then I will guarantee to get you a job doing something against the Germans (the devils)

June 20:

Thanks for yours of the 13^th saying I win – it seems the only reason I won was “no body” would have you… I suppose you wish you were in France today – some German would get you quick. Ain’t it just awful – we all must try our best not to think of these horrible things happening over there. They may be happening here in a year or so.

I am certainly glad to know that “I won.” I see, however, that the only reason I did win (in my advice to you) is that all your political friends turned you down. Am certainly glad they did, for I would hate to know that you were driving an ambulance in some foreign country. The way things look now, you may have a chance to volunteer here by cold weather, but I hope not. If Germany gets the French Navy they will certainly whip England and then they would turn their attention to us. If this should occur in the next eight or nine months they would get us too.

Marjorie and Max (and J.J. Gray) wanted to lament the deteriorating virtue and vigor of American democracy; the younger Kate Walton wanted to kill Germans, save allies, or die trying. That’s a dynamic worth noting for the case and trial to come.

I transcribed those letter excerpts from 1940 on July 3, 2024, just days after the corrupted U.S. Supreme Court decreed that Americans have very few – if any – rights a president is bound to respect. I did not know at the time of writing if beleaguered Joe Biden would remain as the Democratic nominee or whether Donald Trump would ascend to the would-be dictatorship American lawyer John Roberts built for him.

A friend texted me on that day: It’s like a time machine. We are in 1932, but THIS time somebody has the sense to bump off Hindenburg before it’s too late.

In reply, I suggested it’s always 1932. Or 1933. Or 1940. Or 1942. Or 2024. Conditions are always desperate for democracy – assuming it has ever even existed. I’d argue it has not, at least as it’s commonly understood in the American imagination.

Forget “distant” history. Just consider our living memory of the post-Civil Rights era. Has Black America experienced the Drug War and mass incarceration as anything but 1933 or 1942? Was that the trade the country made for ending the brutally-enforced and lawless social norm of black deference to white power? Who voted on that trade?

What about rural/suburban white America and opioids? School kids in the Test-and-Die era? Gay Americans and AIDS? The Sacklers and J6ers are far from the first capital owners and lynch mobs to get away with it in American democracy.

When has America ever, as a country of individuals, concerned itself with “what we could contribute to the general welfare” through our supposedly equal votes, rather than grasping for “what we thought was coming to us?”

The unbinding of the Dred Scott decision is still very much in play. It always will be. It is the human instinct against which all representative self-government always strains.

And yet, somehow, the personal habits of interaction that have emerged from the 260-year illusion of pluralistic self-government have tended to advance – erratically, but consistently – the lived experience of personal freedom and street-level equality.

Undoing those customs will be much harder than unbinding a corrupt and gross and unpopular president by decree and smashing feckless institutions.

But that’s a different book.

***

Marjorie sent her “foolish Zelma” letter from the deck of an oceanliner returning from England in the Fall of 1933.

After that, if you put aside World War II, not much happened to shape the case until Marjorie decided to include “The Census” as a Cross Creek chapter in late 1941. By then, more than a decade had passed since the explosive, unresolved personal drama of 1931 that ended Marjorie and Zelma’s intimacy – and took away Marjorie’s right to honestly call her a friend in print.

But it was 1933, the year of Hyacinth Drift and divorce, that made Marjorie into Marjorie for herself – in a way that made what came afterward possible.

And 1933 is a particularly crucial year for the narrative arc of the case – not to mention the planet. So it bears spending a last extra moment more here to catalogue and contemplate this timeline of 1933 events:

January 17: South Moon Under, Marjorie’s first novel, chosen as “Book of the Month” selection for the March publication to come.

January 30: Adolf Hitler appointed chancellor of Germany by President Paul von Hindenburg

February: South Moon Under published, advance copies begin distribution.

February 27: The Reichstag Fire. The next day Hitler is given sweeping emergency powers in the name of fighting “communism.”

March 4: Franklin Delano Roosevelt sworn in as U.S. president. Launches first New Deal relief programs, including the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA). At some point in 1933, Zelma Cason, at age 37, would go to work full-time for first time in her life through FERA funding.

March 5: Final elections ever held in Nazi Germany. The Nazis only get 43.9 percent of the popular vote, remaining in a coalition government.

March 9-11: Nazis get rid of state and local government under Reichstag Decree.

March 11~: Marjorie begins “Hyacinth Drift” trip down the St. Johns with Dessie Smith, during which decides to divorce first husband Chuck Rawlings.

March 14: Winston Churchill gives first speech on re-arming Britain in response to the Nazis.

March 19: Marjorie, home from the Dessie river trip, declares to Max Perkins: “I came in from the river trip really happy for the first time in months.”

April 10: South Moon Under has sold 6,000 books, good enough for third best-seller in New York Tribune listing, although Perkins laments how bad the Depression Era book business is overall.

Late July: Marjorie embarks on multi-week trip to England to do research for what would become her next novel, Golden Apples.

Fall: Kate Walton enters law school at the University of Florida.

September 21: Marjorie sends the “foolish Zelma” letter on her voyage home from England.

November 8~: Marjorie wins O’Henry Prize for Gal Young ‘Un, as best short story of the previous year.

November 11: Marjorie’s divorce from Chuck is finalized.

December 5: The 21st amendment, repealing the 18th amendment, ends constitutionally-mandated federal alcohol prohibition.

Prohibition repeal is the emphatic exclamation point on the year that truly ended the 1920s and the World War I era. And you can see for yourself how fundamental 1933 is to birthing perhaps the most crucial Cross Creek case character: World War II.

Just as World War I and Prohibition created the context for the Age of Barbarity Klan battles that J.V. Walton fought in the late teens and early 1920s, World War II is the moral and personal soil from which the Cross Creek case grew.

FDR and Hitler assumed power in literally the same week that Marjorie floated along the St. Johns with Dessie Smith, in search of her own assertion of personal power and sovereignty.

The juxtaposition from today, looking backward, makes my neck tingle.

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If you liked this, we’ll see you next Sunday for a chapter titled: “Feme soles in the time of coverture.”

1. Also editor for Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe