J. T. Glisson

I'm not going to repeat what Dan (dchaikin) has written -- his wonderful review is just below.

Just a couple of observations. Whereas Marjorie Kinnan Rawling's The Yearling and Cross Creek are beautifully rendered "outsider" visions of Cracker life on the lakes of Central Florida, Glisson's The Creek gives us that life from the inside. Over the years, the small community at Cross Creek had become an extended family, respecting each others' boundaries and privacy -- Rawlings was extended the same respect, while still remaining somewhat aloof from the heartblood of the Cracker settlers.

"Today people ask me what Cross Creek was like back then....To tell them what they want to hear, I have to skip over the humid heat, the insects, and our occasional internal rows. The remaining description, though true, would sound like advertising for a south Florida subdivision.... I would have to tell them the Garden of Eden could not have been more beautiful. They would be uncomfortable with such an answer, and I would be embarrassed to give it. So I tell them, 'It sure was purty.'"

The Creek also brought to mind another Florida childhood memoir from the same period, though a different locale: Sweetgum Slough: A 1930s Florida Memoir by Claire Karssiens. Highly recommended to any who enjoy this one and Rawlings' writings.… (mer)

49. The Creek by J. T. Glisson
published: 1993
format: 267 page Paperback, with cover art and illustrations by the author.
acquired: sent by a friend, and friend of the author, with autograph, in October
read: Nov 17-22
rating: 4

J.T. Glisson is in [[Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings]]’ 1942 memoir [Cross Creek], her version of his entire boyhood laid out in a paragraph. Cross Creek is a small place in central Florida, somewhere southeast of Gainesville, between two large lakes and made up mostly of swamp, orange groves and wild central Florida woodlands. It’s sparsely populated now, and was even more so then. In Glisson's hand-drawn map from 1940 there are 17 houses over roughly 20 square miles. I think he may have touched on the occupants of all 17 during the course of this book.

Glisson was born in 1927 and basically grew up in a young boys paradise in 1930’s Cross Creek. The Great Depression didn’t really touch this area, which had cleared out long before after a freeze killed the orange groves, which take many years to regrow. What was left were several subsistence families living off what they could grow and, for cash, what fish they could catch and sell, all of which were caught illegally. (“We didn’t play cowboys-and-Indians at Cross Creek. We played fisherman-and-game-wardens”) These are the Florida crackers described in Rawlings’ books. Glisson and his siblings had chores, but otherwise had free reign of the area and all the wonders and dangers nature and an odd but tight rural community could offer—plus he had a nationally famous author next door. His life was akin to that of Tom Sawyer, but over 50 years later with automobiles and a world war on the way.

If you believe Glisson, his 11 year old self stumbled across [[N.C. Wyeth]], father of [[Andrew Wyeth]] and illustrator of [The Yearling], sketching Cross Creek; and he later poured through the book when it showed up on his front porch, neglecting all chores for a full afternoon. Then his 15 year-old self would be shocked to read about himself, by name, and his own family and community when a copy of [Cross Creek] showed up and he went through the same obsessive read.

The era would end all too soon as the war came and several of the community, what had become a self-constructed family, would pass away in a variety of accidents. (Although almost every male of age in Cross Creek joined the military during WWII, only one was killed in action). Rawlings herself died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1953 (she was 57), firmly closing the era she recorded.

I would like to leave a sense of the the magic of this book in my review, but it’s hard to do that. There is an entire world here that is associated with but not actually captured in that of Rawling’s book. And it’s told in a form of a series of adventures, keeping us readers intimately involved. Notably Glisson captures Rawlings herself, through time and from an evolving perspective, bringing out some of the complexity of the spirited high strung outsider she always was in Cross Creek.

It’s always uncomfortable for me when I’m given a book by the author. In this case, I was talking to a friend, who is also close friend of a distant family member, who recently moved to Cross Creek and offered to get me a copy of this book which I had never heard of, signed to me by the author whose existence was a sentence in a book I once read, and delivered free of charge. So I was expecting anything, but I wasn’t expecting this to be a mature work of, as far as I know, an otherwise unpublished author but well regarded illustrator. The introduction talks about how Glisson sat on this book because he was afraid to publish it in the shadow of Rawlings. He finally published it in 1993 and it’s gone through several printings. J.T. Glisson is no secret. You can find videos of him getting interviewed online, including on NPR.

I can strongly recommend this to anyone interested in Majorie Kinnan Rawlings or in the history of this area, or in all the various micro worlds that make up Florida because they aren’t all weird. Some areas are quite wonderful. But I can also recommend this to anyone that just wants a magical well-written memoir that you might find yourself sad to finish. Grateful to have read this.

2017
https://www.librarything.com/topic/260412#6260103… (mer)