Thomas Wolfe’s Florida Memories
“…he lay the night-long through within his berth, watching the shadowy and phantom South flash by, sleeping at length, and waking suddenly, to see cool lakes in Florida at dawn….” Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel
Visitors to the Thomas Wolfe Memorial who tour the Old Kentucky Home boardinghouse see sea shells and coconuts in the house. In Look Homeward, Angel, remembering his father’s house, Eugene Gant recalls “the sea-sound in Gant’s parlor shells….” The Wolfe family was fond of souvenirs from their visits to Florida. A March 1897 family photograph captures Julia Wolfe and six of her children standing in front of the historic City Gate at St. Augustine. Thomas Wolfe first mentions Florida in part one of Look Homeward, Angel while describing his family history. He writes “Once, Eliza and four of her children were sick at the same time with typhoid fever. But during a weary convalescence she pursed her lips grimly and took them off to Florida.” Perhaps it was 1897, before Thomas was born, to St. Augustine. By train on the Southern Railway, coach class or Pullman car, with many stops along the way, the trip to Florida was at best a day and a half.
Julia Wolfe would take young Thomas Wolfe at least three times to Florida in the years between 1908 and 1912, until, as Wolfe describes “…his eleventh or twelfth year when he could no longer travel on half fares…” Eliza Gant, his fictionalized mother, “began to make extensive, although economical, voyages into Florida… in search of health and, rather vaguely, in search of wealth.” It was probably in late 1908 when “they went to Tampa first, and, a few days later, to Saint Petersburg.” The journey likely took them from Asheville to Charleston, SC where the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad, which had acquired Henry Plant’s entire Plant System of railroads, connected to Tampa Bay. Wolfe recalls “He plowed through the loose deep sand of the streets, fished interminably with jolly old men at the end of the long pier, devoured a chest full of dime novels that he found in the rooms she had rented in a private house.” Wolfe notes that they “left abruptly,” due to the birth of his sister Effie’s first child in South Carolina in 1909. But not without a terrific quarrel with their landlord, “an old Cracker who ran the place….” Florida Cracker is the term often applied to early Florida pioneers and their descendants, and their culture among White Southerners.
Another trip to Florida with his mother took Thomas Wolfe along Henry Flagler’s Florida East Coast Railway. Wolfe tells:
And later, again, along the sandy coast of Florida, with Eliza, he wandered down the narrow lanes of Saint Augustine, raced along the hard packed beach of Daytona, scoured the green lawns of Palm Beach, before the hotels, for cocoanuts, which Eliza desired as souvenirs, filling a brown tow sack with them and walking, with the bag hung from his shoulders, down the interminable aisles of the Royal Poinciana or the Breakers, target of scorn, and scandal, and amusement from slave and prince; or traversed the spacious palm-cool walks that cut the peninsula, to see, sprawled in the sensual loose sand the ladies’ silken legs, the brown lean bodies of the men, the long seaplunges in the unending scroll-work of the emerald and infinite sea, which had beat in his brain from his father’s shells, which had played at his mountain heart, but which never, until now, had he seen.
Julia’s brother William Westall and his family spent numerous winters in Florida and Thomas Wolfe describes seeing them in Jacksonville where he and his mother “lived there for several weeks.” On his trips to Florida Wolfe would study with a private tutor or receive school lessons from Julia. At Jacksonville he remembered that he studied with a man from Harvard and went to lunch with his teacher at a buffet, where the man consumed beer and pretzels. To his embarrassment “Eliza protested the tuition when she left… Eugene twisted his neck about, and lifted his foot from the ground.” When his mother returned to Florida again during his fourteenth year she left him to board with his teacher’s family, the Roberts, at the North State Fitting School. “In Florida, meanwhile, Eliza surged up and down the coast, stared thoughtfully at the ungrown town of Miami, found prices too high at Palm Beach, rents too dear at Daytona, and turned inland at length to Orlando. Her brother’s family now owned property near Orlando “groved round with linked lakes and citrous fruits.” Eventually Julia Wolfe would buy land in Florida as far south as Key Biscayne, but after age 11 or 12, Thomas Wolfe would not visit Florida again.
