Ecology of a Cracker Childhood

Ecology of a Cracker Childhood

In south Georgia everything is flat and wide. Not empty. My people live among the mobile homes, junked cars, pine plantations, clearcuts, and fields. They live among the lost forests.

The creation ends in south Georgia, at the very end of the sweet earth."

Even before one opens to the first page of the first chapter of Janisse Ray's Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, a reader is startled by the author's choice of title. "Cracker" is usually used as a negative epithet in the Southern United States to denote someone who is white, but poor and thus low in social status and class, and hence is considered a redneck. But the term ecology implies the book is about the natural and scientific relationship of the earth to humanity. Yet this opening quote about the narrator's life in South Georgia clues the reader as to how the social status of being a poor white 'cracker' in the southern United States can relate to the natural life of the woods. The deep south of Georgia may be "flat and wide," but it is not devoid of interest or "empty" of human and animal life.

My people" -- the author speaks of her own people, poor people who live in much-mocked "mobile homes" amongst fields of "junked" cars, 'piney' people or hicks, with possession and affection, even though she clearly knows how such crackers will be perceived in the eyes of others, perhaps even in the imaginations of her presumably more upper-crust readers. Although they live poorly, among junk cast off by others, these 'crackers' also live at one with the forest. The "clearcuts" refer to specific greenery from natural world, but also to the fact that "my" peoples' status in the South is clear cut, and thus the people have a certain honesty about them, in their relationships with one another as well as with outsiders who look down on them. The fact that the authoress refers to a "cracker" childhood also suggests that it is her childhood, among such 'trailer' people of the pines, that will be a touchstone of the book, specifically her childhood's relationship to the natural world of the wildlife and the ecology of south Georgia.