Ecology of a Cracker Childhood

The summer reading series continues this week with a review of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood by Janisse Ray. The book was published in 1999 by Milkweed Editions, and was recently brought to my attention when Ms. Ray was the keynote speaker at a conservation meeting that I attended recently. Ray is a naturalist and activist who grew up in southern Georgia and now resides in Vermont.

Ecology of a Cracker Childhood is equal parts memoir and tribute to the longleaf pine forest that once dominated the landscape of Georgia. Ray grew up as the child of a deeply religious patriarch who owned a junkyard along Highway 1 in Baxley, Georgia. Ray recounts her family history beginning with her great grandfather. Her family were "Crackers," the hard-drinking, hard-fighting Scottish immigrants who settled in Southern Georgia. Ray's grandfather was an enigma, prone to bouts of violence and lenghty disappearances into the forests. Ms. Ray portrays her grandfather as inseparable from the wildlife that populates the forest, and therefore sees herself and her people as one with the landscape. It is upon this foundation that the story is built.

The longleaf pine forest is largely a thing of the past in Georgia. The trees have been heavily logged and subsequently converted to slash pine forest or development. The resultant impact on the entire ecosystem is profound, even where the land remains forested. Longleaf pine has been replaced with slash pine, which grows more quickly and therefore generates more income than it's slow-growing cousin. However, the slash also grows more thickly than the longleaf and chokes out the understory. Sections of the forest that have been developed have fragmented the landscape. Ray walks us though how these developments have endangered the flora and fauna associated with the longleaf forest. Wiregrass and pine savannahs, Indigo Snakes and Gopher Tortoises, Flatwoods Salamanders and Bachman's Sparrows, all are evolved to live among the longleaf pines. Human greed and gluttony, the impulse to cut and sell every last tree in the forest, imperil these living things and many more. Ray's compassion for the survival of the forest invoked the New York times to consider her the Rachel Carson of the Southeast forests. (See my sidebar, below.)

While the discussion of the longleaf forest is compelling, it is Ray's recounting her family history that sets this book apart from what one would expect from a "nature" book. Ray speaks frankly about the violent nature of her father, grandfather, and other ancestors. She also speaks frankly about the mental illness that gripped many of these same men. Her grandfather, Charlie Ray, is consumed both with illness and violence, and he proves to be the most fascinating character in the book. Charlie Ray was essentially a feral man, posessing a violent streak and a communion with wild animals that evokes the image of a man raised by wolves. His stories are the most entertaining, but it is Ray's father who is the most dominant personality in the book, the one who seems to have had the greatest impact on the young Janisse.

Frank Ray was a devout man, a strict disciplinarian who did not allow a television in his house. He dealt in scraps, running a junkyard and making a living bartering for items that many people simply throw away. It was a struggle to provide for his four children, and they were quite poor, though never without food on the table. Frank Ray did not shy away from using a belt to discipline his children, and he also had a bout with mental illness. Janisse Ray recounts these facts without judgement, and she makes a point to ensure the reader that she knew that her father loved her and her siblings profoundly. It's an honest reflection of real life, but the relationship feels unresolved in this book. Perhaps this is by design, as most relationships are not lent to simple resolutions, and regardless, Frank Ray is still alive. I'm sure that the relationship continues to evolve.

It is the descriptions of Ray's childhood that were most challenging for me as a reader - not due to the content in any way, but in my personal relationship to the era. Because Janisse Ray had such a rural upbringing, with no television and with a junkyard as a playground, the stories evoked mental images of the 1940s. However, Janisse Ray is a direct contemporary of mine, having been born just three years before me. We grew up at the same time and in the same country, yet the stories seem quite distant to me. It is doubtless, however, that my reality and hers crossed paths. Ray may have gone to school in dresses sewn by her mother, but she certainly had classmates who wore the ghastly polyester fashions that were in vogue during the 1970's. She may have grown up without a television, but she attended school with kids who spent lunch hours discussing the prior evening's episode of Mork and Mindy. It's a challenge to me, because I don't believe that my personal experiences are worthy of a memoir, but I find Janisse Ray's to be a very interesting story.

Ray's concern for the forests, and her deeply personal memoirs, are enough to make this book a recommended read. One other aspect that truly sets the book apart is Ray's writing style, which at times evokes heartfelt emotion and, at it's best, waxes into pure poetry. Consider this passage as Ray describes spending a night in the pine savannas:

At evening in a Southern coastal-plain savanna, chuck-will's-widows call from the piney flatwoods a quarter mile upland. Not a rustle or hoof fall punctures the peace, except one moaning howl a mile a way that might be coyote or wildcat. Half the moon, like a broken dinner plate, poises directly overhead and the stars begin to appear, first in the nimbus of moon, then one by one across the lit sky. Soon a canopy of purple velvet is sewn with diamond flecks above the thick and hillocked grasses.

The dreaming is deep.

In the morning, a strip of pink pools through the slash pines in the lowland east. The fog is a garden wall made both of stone and imagination. In the garden a million million spiderwebs are spun of strands of dew - dream catchers, wind nets, hammocks of dawn. There are thousands of them, a revolution of spiderwebs in an anarchy of fog. It is like an ocean of webs, every tussock slung with a diaphanous nightcap.

The words are rich with imagery, and draw the reader into this beautiful part of the world that bears preserving. While the subject matter isn't always a pleasant read, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood never fails to compel.