Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, by Janisse Ray.
Milkweed Editions, 2000.
$11.95 - 224 pages.

Janisse Ray is a cracker - a cracker with a noble spirit, a message and an eloquent way of delivering it. Ray’s award-winning memoir, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, was selected for Western Carolina University’s 2001 New Summer Reading Program. Ecology of a Cracker Childhood won the Southeastern Booksellers Award for Nonfiction in 1999, the Before Columbus Society American Book Award 2000, the Southern Books Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and the Southern Environmental Law Center’s 2000 Award for Outstanding Writing on the Southern Environment.

The Summer Reading Program is designed to set the academic tone and enhance the intellectual climate for new students at WCU. As part of the program, Ray spoke to WCU freshmen last month and participated in a panel discussion.

The memoir alternates between essays about Ray’s family, a lineage that permeates 180 years of Appling County’s history, and essays about the nearly extinct longleaf pine ecosystem of coastal Georgia that preceded Ray’s ancestors by eons.

Ray’s strength as an environmental activist and her art as a wordsmith can be attributed to the fact that she makes no excuses. It’s as if she were writing with Ockham’s razor. She writes of her ancestors’ use of the land:

“Passing through my homeland it was easy to see that Crackers, although fiercely rooted in the land and willing to defend it to death, hadn’t the means, the education or the ease to care particularly about its natural community ... Our relationship with the land wasn’t one of give and return ... when getting by meant using the land, we used it. When getting by meant ignoring the land, we ignored it.”


By admitting complicity in the degradation of the environment, Ray is saying let’s get beyond blame and get to restoration, recovery and healing.

By writing honestly about the sinew of mental illness that tied together generations of her family, she is saying the same thing: let’s get to recovery and healing. To paraphrase an ancient Chinese philosophy: For the Way to remain holy, the Way must remain unnamed.

Ray does not try to explain the values inherent in a longleaf pine forest. She does not try to explain why community is important. Instead she shows you the intimate associations of a longleaf ecosystem and the profound connections to community and place. We see these associations and connections mirrored within us, as Ray does: “The memory of what they entered [the longleaf forest] is scrawled on my bones so that I carry the landscape inside like an ache.”

Ray is decidedly an activist. But to say she is an environmental activist would be a misnomer. “This is not about some goddamn environmental movement. This is about our life,” Ray said in an interview after her appearance at WCU.

“This is about what it means to be fully human; to be engaged with our landscape; to be connected to our families, our communities and each other on an emotional and physical level.”

She knows that action flows from right thinking. She is one of the founders of the Altamaha Riverkeeper. She helped the Georgia Nature Based Tourism Association preserve the 3,400-acre Moody Swamp in her home county.

She does not seek the spotlight for these accomplishments because she knows she is still complicit. The junkyard, in Bagley, Ga., owned by her father that she roamed as a child still resides along US Highway 1. “The homestead [a working farm] is still not environmentally friendly,” she said.

But that does not deter her. “I’m a woman with a mission. I would like to see the longleaf brought back and the native ecosystem taken care of. I wrote the book not to write a memoir. I wrote the book to preserve the longleaf pine.”

She said she asks herself, before beginning a project, “Does it honor the human spirit? Does it elevate the dignity of us as human beings?” Ecology of a Cracker Childhood succeeds on both accounts.

Her father, whose mental illness was discussed in the book, had to sign a release saying he would not sue. He wrote, “This is not my truth but it’s my daughter’s truth and I honor her telling it.”

Janisse Ray is a Cracker. A Cracker with a powerful truth and the courage, honesty and talent to tell it in a way it can’t be denied.

(Don Hendershot can be reached at 452.4251 or don@smokymountainnews.com)

 

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