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Book Review
| Ecology of a Cracker Childhood. By Janisse Ray. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 1999. 285 pp. Paper $14.95.
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| On the cover of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, Janisse Ray is touted as the Rachael Carson of the Southeast. Such a statement is not far off the mark, but it does not tell enough about this unusual memoir. Ray, a self-described cracker, grew up in the flat, humid wiregrass of the South Georgia coastal plain. Her parents claimed they found her on a bed of pine needles under "bayonet-tipped palmetto fronds" in their junkyard (p. 6). |
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Ray wraps her life story within her ecological passion for the longleaf pine forests native to the Southeast coastal plain and along the way explains the environmental history of those forests. Ray builds the ecosystem up (or perhaps down) from the longleaf pine and examines the notable species diversity of these forests and their unique qualities as a habitat. In the twentieth century, landowners and the timber industry maximized profits by replacing longleaf forests with faster-growing pine varieties, draining the pine plantations of the region, and enforcing a monoculture by controlled burning and herbicides. This transformation is most dramatically covered in her four-page chapter "Clearcut," which admonishes, "If you clear a forest, you'd better pray continuously" because "God doesn't like a clearcut" (p. 123). |
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She uses a structure of alternating chapters on her life and the ecological history of her region. As memoir this reinforces the sense that humans are intertwined with the environment as she connects personal experience with changes in the landscape. She provides a respectful but critical insider's view of significant themes of Southern history: poverty, religion, cracker culture, and the transformative power of education. |
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This impressionistic book demonstrates that the Muir branch of environmental writing is alive and well. Nature is important in and of itself, but humans learn and are bettered from communing with and in it. All this fits very well into Milkweed Editions' mission of publishing works on the intimate connection of humans and the natural world. |
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Ecology of a Cracker Childhood is a stirring work that can benefit any reader. Because it covers an often-overlooked region of the South, undergraduates could profitably read this as an introduction to twentieth-century environmental history or Southern history. Ray personalizes the interaction of man and environment and draws attention to the sublime qualities of forests that disappear when the landscape is regarded as a giant field for cultivating. This book is also a call to action to realize her "dream [that] we can bring back the longleaf ... along with the sandhills and the savannas ... and ... all the herbs and trees and wild animals, the ones not irretrievably lost, which deserve an existence apart from slavery to our own" (p. 270). Ray is as subtle as a chainsaw here, but it may be too late for subtlety if the South has any hope of coming to a new sense of the old cliché that it "will rise again" (p. 272). |
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Reviewed by James Tuten, Juniata College. |
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