Ecology of a Cracker Childhood

I am always grateful when a book introduces me to a place completely unknown to me. Janisse Ray’s gorgeous memoir does exactly that: southern Georgia's disappearing longleaf pine forests. Her introduction to this landscape is a gift to readers, who will yearn, as she does, for its regeneration after a century of exploitation.

Raised in a junkyard along a busy highway, this writer learned the land’s history through the stories of her parents and others; she learned the intricate ecology of the pines and their companion flora and fauna, almost lost to industry and greed. Lyrical and beautifully written, Ray’s… show more.

Part memoir, part requiem, this book is an ode to the hardscrabble beauty of the land and people of the longleaf pine. I read this book when it first came out in 1999 and more recently revisited it.

Janisse Ray writes about Georgia, where she grew up in a junkyard off Highway 1 and where my grandmother was from. She could just as easily have been writing about North Carolina and our fast-declining hemlock population here.

Reading this book gave this Appalachian boy an appreciation for the flat savannah down east with an ecosystem and culture both unique and fascinating.

The New York Times called Janisse Ray the Rachel Carson of her native South Georgia. Indeed, her descriptions of the region’s low- and tall-growing plants and the crawling, flying, stalking, burrowing, nesting, and denning creatures bring to life the pine-and-scrub woodland that circumscribed her years growing up. Part memoir and part nature study, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood pays tribute to the region’s cathedral-esque longleaf pines, pillars of a sylvan ecosystem that once ranged across the Southeast. Their environment is now as rare as the Packards and Ramblers that once littered her father’s auto junkyard, hidden from the road by… show more.