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Review for The Roanoke Times "Redneck" is the term more commonly used in Southwestern Virginia. Farther south, in the coastal plains of Janisse Ray’s native Georgia, the word is "Cracker." Such epithets are commonly used by outsiders to convey a backwardness and provinciality in people. But central questions in Ecology of a Cracker Childhood are what’s wrong with being rooted in one’s place or region, or skeptical of so-called progress? Part of Ray’s story is coming to terms with an ignominious or "Cracker" past, a theme of much Southern literature: "It has taken a decade to whip the shame . . . to own the bad blood." Ray’s home was literally a junkyard her family owned, surrounded by a singing forest of tall longleaf pines whose story neither Ray nor her ancestors knew well. Ecology is then two stories: Ray's autobiographical essays of her childhood near the junkyard, and the ecology and history of the forest where that narrative took place. Since the two are broken up into separate chapters, at first they don’t seem well integrated. The loose, rambling narratives can feel like a ride in a junkyard jalopy, as opposed to the short, informative chapters that focus on the forest and its vanishing species. Unless one remembers that such a contrast is precisely the point. Though Ray’s father intended to impose an order on the Ray family through religious fundamentalism and fixing old junk, Janisse Ray’s childhood was lacking in a unity and wildness she later found in her native ecosystem. The memoir sections saunter through a random landscape of glass shards, loose tires, and jacked-up cars with edgy precision. Ray's father, with his bouts against mental illness, and her grandfather, with his disappearances into the wilderness, seem like characters out of a Faulkner story. Rarely do the worlds of human and non-human seem to merge—not a flaw in the book but what Ray wishes to expose—except that both are vanishing, partly as a result of their inability to commingle. Underneath the view imposed on her that nature is dangerous and disorderly is Ray's growing recognition of its beauty. She wants to teach her "Crackers" more about where they live so they can care for their natural communities. The pride in a Southern heritage and homeland is there, as she sees it, but what’s missing is the fight: "We Southerners are a people fighting again for our country," fighting to return the forests to their former wildness and glory. One almost wishes she would craft the autobiographical narratives into a separate memoir. Such a project would give her first published work of prose quite a different feel. It would give Ray’s lighthearted voice a work of its own, but it would sacrifice the bittersweet quality of this book. What makes Ecology of a Cracker Childhood successful is an incongruity-- captured in the title--of wonder that grows in the junkyard during her childhood, and anger that emerges much later in the forest. Bumpy rides can jar us, but they help clear the head. This book is well worth the trip. |
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