A First Look: Ecology of a Cracker Childhood

I have recently been starting to read Ecology of a Cracker Childhood by Janisse Ray.

It is essentially a part-auto-biographical, part-heartfelt tale of love and longing for the writer's native people and landscape.  I mention the work because it has already been one of the most gripping works I have ever read from a contemporary writer.  The title is amusing or perhaps not to be taken seriously, the subject matter is hardly the most powerful choice of topic for amazing literature, and the work is probably not well known outside of a readership that is interested in books on nature, and yet for the life of me I can't put the thing down.

Perhaps this is emblematic of the way many of us in North America treat the region that Janisse speaks about.  The coastal plain or "Deep South" is often derided as a backwater culturally and economically.  In terms of the landscape, it is often seen as a fly-over area that people speed through in order to get to the beauty of the Gulf beaches or tourist Florida.  I myself am somewhat turned off by the heat and humidity that the author herself makes note to remind her readers of very early on in the introduction to her world.  Our misconceptions and biases, of course, blind us to the beauty of what our own desires have largely helped to destroy.

Picture a world of towering pines, an understory of lovely wildflowers, palms, magnolias, and evergreen oaks draped in Spanish Moss.  

This is a world that Janisse Ray has seen disappear in the face of economic pressures on the South to conform to the patterns and development paths of the rest of the continent.  While she is not specifically claiming that her childhood spent in a scrap yard surrounded by Longleaf Pine forests is something that she wishes to preserve and spread around as the ideal of Georgian life, she does lament the fact that the forests have been mowed over and that she, her family, and her ancestors have been mocked and shunned as backward rednecks who don't understand proper living.  Indeed, she thinks that the farther the rest of us get from a life shared with the land, the more we don't really understand what proper living ought to be.  As we grow more accustomed to forgetting our relationship with the land, we North Americans are going to keep getting greedier and less concerned about what makes our nations, no matter where we were once from, into what they have become and might yet be.

Most of us were first seen by our parents in a hospital.  Janisse was found among the leaves of a palmetto in the middle of a scrap yard.  The first page alone is enough to break your heart.  I will post a big review once I can make it through the rest of her book.