Fifty years ago, when Florida was still a half-wild place where roads of ankle-deep sand disappeared into miasmic swamps, there lived a writer named Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and her maid, Idella Parker.

Marjorie Rawlings was a famous and lonely and proud woman, who chain-smoked Lucky Strikes and wore mismatched socks, who lived in a house deep in the Big Scrub, where she wrote beautiful books about orange groves and her cracker neighbors. Her best-known work is the Pulitzer Prize-winning coming-of-age classic "The Yearling."

Her maid was never famous. No, Idella Parker says, she was ...

Find more facts and information related to the article "Together, but Not Equal; A `Perfect' Maid's ..."