While they worked on the structure of her stories, Rawlings realized that she had to learn more about the Cracker people whose lives she was about to chronicle. She wanted to range further afield, beyond her Cross Creek neighborhood to the big scrub, an area bounded on the west and north by the Oklawaha River and on the east by the St. Johns River and Lake George. In late August 1931 Rawlings moved in with Piety and Leonard Fiddia, a Cracker family she had befriended in the scrub. From Piety--a "ninety-pound wisp of a white-haired mother, who ploughs" and can kill a rattlesnake--Rawlings learned how to "wash her heavy quilts," take care of domestic chores, and speak certain local phrases. From Piety's young son Leonard--"a boy as indigenous to the scrub as the deer" (Max and Marjorie 40)--Rawlings learned survival skills that were often on the far side of the law. In a 4 November 1931 letter to Perkins, Rawlings describes the pleasures of life in the scrub: "The life in the scrub is peculiarly right. While I was there, I did all the illegal things too; stalked deer with a light at night, out of season, kept the family in squirrels, paddled the boat while my friend dynamited mullet, shot limpkin on the river edge and had to wade waist deep in cypress swamp to get him (if you haven't eaten roast limpkin, you just haven't eaten)" (45).
One of the illegal activities in which Leonard Fiddia was engaged was moonshining. His dangerous brushes with the law and other outlaw ‘shiners in the scrub would form "the main thread" of Rawlings's first novel, South Moon Under. Rawlings was on hand to observe an incident that would provide background to the novel: "Just the week before I went over to stay, a cousin of my ‘shiner friend betrayed him, with two others, to the federal agents, and his still was torn up and burned. I had one experience I would not have missed for a great deal--a discussion of a group of the ‘shiners and their friends, of various plans or dealing with the traitor. Nothing definite has been done to him yet . . . but in one way and another they are closing in on him, and some day he will simply disappear" (45).
(excerpt from The M. K. Rawlings Society)