Cross Creek, FL – Bill Brown walked through the soft sand of the old orange grove, his cane pushing several inches into the sand as he walked. The cool and breezy air was pungent with the smell of just-picked oranges sitting in crates throughout the grove. Wood-smoke drifted from the house where Park Ranger Carrie Todd and volunteers were baking molasses cookies for the holidays on the old cast-iron stove.
The orange harvest was underway last Friday at the historic Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings farm, now run by the Florida Park Service. The grove made a living for author Rawlings in the 1930s, and she drew inspiration from her and her neighbors’ daily lives for her Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “The Yearling.”
Bill, his wife, Verna, and a handful of volunteers were there to pick fruit for needy Florida families, although, at 86, he left the picking and packing to the younger volunteers, a Marion County 4-H group.
“We drive a thousand miles a week gathering food,” he said, referring to The Children’s Table, a charity the Browns formed twenty years ago. As of November, he said the group had served 186,000 people in 2015.
Bill came to Florida in the 1960s to organize the state for Bobby Kennedy, the United States Attorney General who mounted a presidential campaign after his brother, President John Kennedy, was assassinated. Bill met and married Verna, a nurse, and the two became foster parents. Seeing families who didn’t have enough food, they began giving away produce from their garden.
One day a social worker came to see them. She had just been to the home of a single mother with three children and wondered if the Browns could help. “There wasn’t a crumb of food in the whole house,” said Verna. “So we went to the grocery store and loaded up a cart.”
Then another social worker came about another hungry family. “Pretty soon, word got around,” said Verna with a laugh. The Browns formed a non-profit called “The Children’s Table” to gather supplemental and emergency food for poor families.
For the past twenty years, The Children’s Table has fed hungry, rural families in an eight-county region in north central Florida with an all-volunteer staff of 25. They gather food from restaurant and retail distributors or excess crops and seven times a week they give it away at various distribution sites. Emergency food is available 24-hours-a-day.
They’ve been harvesting oranges from the Rawlings grove for eight years. “They’re so good to us. Every year they call and every year we come,” said Verna.
Marjorie Rawlings eventually made a good living off of the grove and her string of successful books and short stories, but the early days were lean. In her memoir, “Cross Creek,” she wrote of having to rely on her neighbors, though they were fiercely independent, back-woods folk.
“And when the great enemies of Old Starvation and Old Death come skulking down on us, we put up a united front and fight them side by side, as we fight the woods fires,” she wrote.
After the volunteers finished loading crates into the truck, Bill gathered them in a circle to thank them.
“There’s a saying,” he told them. “If you don’t touch your fellow man, you won’t touch the hand of God.”
The oranges picked Friday will be boxed up for hungry families in time for Christmas, a legacy of fellowship that lives on in a quiet corner of Old Florida.
The Children’s Table can be found on Facebook or on its website, www.childrenstable.org. Information on the Rawlings home and grove can be found at www.floridastateparks.org/park/Marjorie-Kinnan-Rawlings.
