South Moon Under by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

" But if the road had been hard, it was also pleasant. If a living was uncertain, and the sustaining of breath precarious, why existence took on an added value and a greater sweetness. The tissues of life were food and danger. These were the warp and woof, and all else was an incidental pattern, picked out with vari-coloured wools. Love and lust, hate and friendship, grief and frolicking, even birthing and dying, were thin grey and scarlet threads across the sun-browned, thick and sturdy stuff that was life itself."
                                          -from the novel

Had I not recently become a Marjorie Rawlings fan in preparation for teaching a class about her and her work and in my reading of The Yearling, I probably would not have chosen to read this book at all. As it turns out, I am glad I did because it reminded me of many things I had learned about this author. First, Rawlings, a relative newcomer to Florida in the early 1930's,  had stayed for some months with Piety and Leonard Fiddia in the Big Scrub, what is now part of the Ocala National Forest, researching this book. She modeled her main character Lant and his mother, Piety Jacklin, after the two of them. Just as Leonard and his kinfolk made a living off the land any way they could---hunting, fishing, trapping, timbering, moonshining---both by legal and illegal means, so does Lant in South Moon Under. Second, much of this novel reminded me of The Yearling, written a few years later. For example, a wife filled with bitterness much as Ora Baxter; a hunt for a stock-killing wildcat using dogs, reminiscent of Penny and Jody's hunt for Slewfoot the bear; beautiful descriptions of travel on the river and, of course, the Cracker dialect and culture was similar. Also South Moon Under was a Book of the Month selection and a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, which the author would win with her third novel, The Yearling. A significant difference was the passage of time, several years in this novel, while The Yearling spans only one year.

I was curious about the title. Apparently, these early Florida folk predicted much animal behavior by the movement of the moon, as in Lant's thoughts: "The deer and the rabbits, the fish and the owls, stirred at moon-rise and at moon-down; at south-moon over and at south-moon-under. The moon swung around the earth, or the earth swung around the moon, he was not sure. The moon rose in the east and that was moon-rise. Six hours later it hung at its zenith between east and west, and that was south-moon-over. It set in the west and that was moon-down. Then it passed from sight and swung under the earth, between west and east. And when it was directly under the earth, that was south-moon-under."

I am rating South Moon Under a 4. Hints of romance and some vigilante justice keep the theme of survival from becoming too tedious. Some readers may find too much description in this novel but it does give an accurate picture of life in Florida in the early 20th century before it became a tourist mecca. And one cannot help but admire these people who were bound and determined to eke out a living under extreme circumstances. Just think---August in Florida with no air conditioning!