By Deborah Emin, Lehigh Valley Group
Reviewing books like Janisse Ray’s “Ecology of a Cracker Childhood,” (Milkweed Editions, 1999) is a privilege. I have been teaching memoir writing for many years, and this is one of those books that has made my love of this form grow stronger. Ms. Ray’s book doesn’t follow a conventional narrative arc because her personal story is inextricably bound with the place she is from--Baxley, Georgia.
Baxley, Georgia, exists within her personal story, a story about a girl growing up surrounded by a loving but damaged family, grounded in a Christian way of life that excludes her from participating in the lives of her classmates, situated in a home that is supported by the junkyard that grows all around them, and surrounded by three other siblings and loving parents.
This alone would be enough to create a compelling story, but that is not the sum total of how Ms. Ray understands the world. As I see it, she loves the entire ecology of the place, the history of her ancestors living there and is particularly attached to the longleaf pine. The destruction of this Georgia native tree serves as an anchor to what life is like.
With a linguistic gift for combining the effects of the natural world with the precise scientific cataloging of all she observes, the reader sits immersed in a poetic (that is, contemplative) relation to the landscape and the power it holds. For her, I believe, language is a tool that opens doors to action. It inspires her, if I may presume, to access what we have, what we have lost, and what we can do to try to rectify the damage we have done.
From her story, it is clear, she values above all the relations of her family and the land she was raised on. But I think that love extends beyond the personal into the world at large. Through her empathic stories of the fates of other animals and how the destruction of the environment has affected their lives, we learn the consequences of our actions and are called to participate with her in a changed mindset about how we relate to the world we inhabit.
Ms. Ray’s interweaving of fact, vision, and poetry speak of a different type of memoir than we are accustomed to reading. Opening this book has led me to a new expectation of what a memoir can do. I have read it more than once and encourage all readers to do the same.
From the moment one enters her story, we live with her:
“In south Georgia, everything is flat and wide. Not empty. My people live among the mobile homes, junked cars, pine plantations, clear-cuts, and fields. They live among the lost forests.
“The creation ends in south Georgia, at the very edge of the sweet earth. Only the sky, widest of the wide, goes on, flatness against flatness.”
And so we are drawn into this place that has given life to a most remarkable woman.
Deborah Emin is a writer and teacher living in East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. Her work is available at her website: DeborahEminBooks.com.
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