Book review: Ecology of a Cracker Childhood by Janisse Ray. Milkweed Editions. 1999.
This classic of environmental literature is set in rural southern Georgia. “There’s nothing in south Georgia, people will tell you, except straight, lonely roads, one-horse towns, sprawling farms, and tracts of planted pine. It’s flat, monotonous, used-up, hotter than hell in summer and cold enough in winter that orange trees won’t grow.”
In her memoir Janisse Ray shows how wrong those people are. If you know how to see and where to look, rural Georgia is full of natural beauty. We learn about her family, with deep roots in this land for many generations, and we learn about what we all lost when the vast forests of longleaf pine were replaced by pine plantations of slash and loblolly.
Though the family was quite poor, and for a few years the father had frightening spells of mental illness, this is a memoir of an idyllic childhood. Ray grew up in a small house in the middle of her family’s junkyard on Route 1. The whole family worked together - cleaning, hauling, dismantling. The parents were deeply in love with each other and devoted to their children.
image: Old Car City, White, Ga by Mike Boening Photography. Flickr.com
Ray’s parents, strict Christian fundamentalists, forbade TV and movies. Because bathing suits are immodest, the children couldn’t swim in the hot Georgia summer. There were no team sports, no friends over after school. But they had the huge junkyard, the best of all possible playgrounds for four imaginative children. They played school, with an old red truck for a chalkboard and Ray as the stern teacher. They played baptism in a broken-down school bus. They chased each other across the roofs of junked cars, and found treasure in the seats and floorboards.
Ray was a wild child, with bells tied on her shoes so her mother could keep track of her. She spent all her free time outdoors, playing in the junkyard, climbing trees and exploring creeks, but her deep curiosity about the natural world only began when her fifth grade science teacher took her in hand.
image: wikimedia commons
Her family included a grandfather who supported himself by selling raccoon skins to Sears. The wife he left behind - she sent him away when she could no longer tolerate his mad violence - supported their eight children by selling bootleg liquor and running a café.
Ray describes her father as a native genius. He was a fascinating, complex man with a huge and tender heart. He invented, created, repaired: machines, guns, injured birds. Self-taught, he loved knowledge, and posed quiz questions for the children, rewarding correct answers with a dime.
Her mother worked in the junkyard and ran the home, cooking, cleaning, bandaging the children’s wounds and making all their clothes. “As I reached womanhood, when I was first hot for equality, justice, and freedom...I was impatient with my mother’s refusal to assert herself. Only years later did I appreciate her wisdom, her steadfastness.”
Ray alternates chapters about members of her family with chapters about the longleaf pine forests which once covered south Georgia and north Florida. Of the plants and creatures those forests supported, many are now endangered or extinct. She combines the deep knowledge of a naturalist with the gift of clear, precise, often poetic description.
“In a longleaf forest, miles of trees forever fade into a brilliant salmon sunset and reappear the next dawn as a battalion marching out of fog. ...The trees are so well-spaced that their limbs seldom touch, and sunlight streams between and within them. Below their flattened branches, grasses arch their tall richly dun heads of seeds, and orchids and lilies paint the ground...”
DeSoto National Forest - a longleaf pine ecosystem image:wikipedia
Her accounts of the evolution of the longleaf pine, of the life course of many creatures - red cockaded woodpecker, flatland salamander, Bachmann’s sparrow, indigo snake - are written as fascinating stories. She imagines the physical experience of each creature but avoids the folly of humanizing them. In minute detail she describes the salamanders crawling back to breed in the lowland puddles where they were hatched, the red-cockaded woodpeckers drilling cavities for their nests, then pecking away at the surrounding bark to send the sap trickling down, “forming a scabby quagmire that helps protect the woodpecker nest from rat snakes...”
images: red cockaded woodpecker feeding young john maxwell for usfws @ wikimedia; frosted flatwood salamander usgs.gov
I love this book. I often drive the back roads of southern Georgia to a friend’s cabin in the Oconee national forest click, and wonder about the landscape and people that have shaped each other. Janisse Ray opens a door to their world.
Thank you so much, Feminist Grandma. (I'm one of those too!) This is wonderful. I'm so glad you enjoyed the book.
Janisse
Posted by: [email protected] | 12/23/2018 at 08:40 AM