Ecology of a Cracker Childhood

“‘Half Wild,’ [Mama would] murmur. She had to tie bells on my shoes, silver jingle bells that gave away my whereabouts and led her to me.” 

As a child, Ray longs to explore the junkyard and wild forests that surround her house, often hiding in them from her mother. Ray uses this anecdote as evidence of her wildness, and of her deep, almost instinctual passion for nature.

“Even now in places […] you can see how south Georgia used to be, before all the old longleaf pine forests that were our sublimity and our majesty were cut. Nothing is more beautiful, nothing more mysterious, nothing more breathtaking, nothing more surreal.”

Though Georgia was once covered by the unique ecosystem of longleaf pine forests, most of these have been cut down by loggers and replaced by more generic pine plantations. Ray bemoans the loss of these lands, emphasizing how Georgia’s natural beauty has been destroyed in the name of profit.

“Turning back to embrace the past has been a long, slow lesson not only in self-esteem but in patriotism—pride in homeland, heritage. It has taken a decade to whip the shame, to mispronounce words and shun grammar when mispronunciation and misspeaking are part of my dialect, to own the bad blood.” 

When Ray leaves for college, she becomes acutely aware of how different and backwards her rural Southern family is. Though Ray at first attempts to mask her southern roots, she eventually embraces them as a part of her unique heritage. 

“Longleaf and lightning began to depend on each other and other plants—the ground cover grasses and forbs, or flowering herbs—evolved to survive and welcome fire as well […] Longleaf became known as the pine that fire built.” 

The southern Georgia landscape is often marred by thunderstorms, with lightning causing fires to sweep across the land. Over the centuries, the longleaf pine has evolved to thrive within this fiery landscape, developing thick bark. Though fires are often thought of as threatening to the existence of forests, the longleaf pine forests cannot survive without these periodic fires. 

“Charlie could’ve tutored me, had he been able, in the swamp’s secrets—how to survive as an orphan there and how to survive in general. Even as a young girl I desired this unwrought knowledge and knew it unreachable, fenced as it was by Grandpa’s anguish, which had driven him toward the solace of the wild in the first place […]” 

Though Ray loves the company of her paternal grandfather, Charlie, she’s unable to fully connect to him due to the lingering effects of his mental illness and harsh upbringing. While Ray and Charlie share a passion for the forestland, Charlie’s antisocial tendencies mean that he is never able to fully share his knowledge and love with Ray.

“Here [in the longleaf pine forests] I walk shoulder to shoulder with history—my history. I am in the presence of something ancient and venerable, perhaps of time itself, its unhurried passing marked by immensity and stolidity, each year purged by fire, cinched by a ring.” 

Throughout Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, Ray uses figurative language to emphasize the interconnectedness between herself (and by extension, all humans) with the landscape that surrounds them. Though the longleaf pine forests predate Ray by thousands of years, Ray asserts that their history is her own history, and that she is intimately connected to these ancient trees. 

“Through the years I had no way of understanding what was happening [to my father]—no language for it. I had only emotions. Terror. I was frightened by an unbidden and uncontrollable illness that might pounce at any time and leap away with me in its claws.”

When Ray’s father first succumbs his mental illness, Ray’s deeply afraid of witnessing her father in the throes of mania. Part of what is so fearful is that she lacks any language for understanding it, as mental illness is still poorly understood during the 1960s.

“More than anything else, what happened to the longleaf country speaks for us. These are my people; our legacy is ruination.” 

Within 50 years of their entering the region, the Crackers log and destroy nearly all of the longleaf pine forests that had once been so bountiful in south Georgia. Though Ray did not directly partake in the logging, she feels the destruction to be her own personal responsibility as the descendent of the Crackers. 

“Daddy’s was an amazing triad of traits—frugality, creativity, and mechanical ingenuity—so that as I grew, our real estate grew.” 

Though Daddy is uneducated, Ray writes that he possesses a “native genius” that allows Daddy the cleverness to succeed at fixing machines. Despite this natural talent, Daddy is also constantly plagued by a severe mental illness, which at times causes him to completely lose his grasp on reality. 

“‘The moral of the story, Son,’ Pun would say, ‘is Don’t take more on your heart than you can shake off on your heels.’ Of all lessons, that one I never learned and hope I never do. My heart daily grows new foliage, always adding people, picking up new heartaches […]”

Ray’s paternal great-grandfather, Pun, often tells a story that warns of allowing one’s heart to feel too deeply for other people or things. Ray’s entire personality and worldview is antithetical to this sentiment. She believes it’s deeply important to feel empathy and care for the people and natural world that surrounds one. 

“What I want to describe is that when I was growing up, the world about me was subverted by the world of the soul, the promise of a future after death. Much of my time I spent seeking purity, meaning I desired to be good, to honor my parents and glorify God, in order to enter his kingdom one day.” 

Ray’s strict, fundamentalist, religious upbringing is at odds with her current environmentalist passions. Ray’s childhood church emphasizes the importance and priority of the spiritual afterlife over the physical and material world. In such an ideology, nature is seen as unimportant in comparison to God.

“God doesn’t like a clearcut. It makes his heart turn cold, makes him wince and wonder what went wrong with his creation, and sets him to thinking about what spoils the child.”

In parts of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, Ray uses religious language to suggest that the destruction of forests is a sin against God’s will. As the Bible’s “Book of Genesis” teaches that all of God’s creation is good, Ray suggests that any man-made alteration of the natural landscape tells God that there is something wrong with his creation. 

“I tell these stories so that you can see my father is a curious man, intrigued by the secret lives of animals, a curiosity that sprang from his desire to fix things, to repair the things of the world and make them fly and hop and operate again, and to mold his children into good people.” 

In Chapter 13, Ray relates a number of anecdotes about times her father desperately seeks to save sick or injured animals. Though Daddy typically evinces a lack of interest in the natural world, Ray believes that underlying his gruffness is a deep empathy and curiosity for wildlife. 

“As ornithologist Todd Engstrom puts it, red-cockaded woodpeckers have three levels of need: tree, for roosting and nesting; forest, for foraging; and landscape, for exchange of clan members […] When one member of a group dies, an individual from a nearby group can fill the gap, maintaining social structures.” 

In describing the ecology of red-cockaded woodpeckers, Ray emphasizes how their livelihood depends on the longleaf pine forest spreading out over an entire landscape, so that several smaller groups of woodpeckers can interact with each other. This underscores that it is not enough to preserve small patches of forest—the longleaf pine ecosystem must be preserved across large swathes of land. 

“Our relationship with the land wasn’t one of give and return. The land itself has been the victim of social dilemmas—racial injustice, lack of education, and dire poverty.” 

Ray believes that the destruction of the longleaf pine forests must be understood as a result of larger societal problems. As those in rural Georgia are plagued by severe poverty, they have no choice but to seek money and survive in any means possible—such as the logging of the forests. Ray suggests that the only means to repair the environment is to fix societal inequality. 

“Of plants and animals native to the longleaf pine barren, the gopher tortoise may be most crucial, in the same way the keystone, or upper central stone in an arch, is thought to be most important in holding the other stones in place. The tortoise is central in holding the ecosystem together.”

In the longleaf pine ecosystem, gopher tortoises create deep burrows that serve as temporary homes for the hundreds of other species that reside in longleaf pine forests. Thus, any behavior that threatens gopher tortoises could also cause the entire ecosystem to collapse.

“Growing up, I thought my mother was beautiful and loved her desperately, but I did not want to be like her. She had given up too much—her own opinions, even—to marry a strong man and be his helpmate, though he fathered her children and provided for her family and stayed loyal to her all the days of his life.” 

While Ray deeply admires Mama for her strength and forcefulness, she recognizes that Mama has relinquished some of her independence and chosen security in the form of her father. As an adult, Ray seeks to create a different life for herself and not become a housewife like her mother. 

“Blindly the salamanders crawl, faithful to old processes lodged in their tiny skulls, faithful to the place of beginnings. A picture of that place is soldered into their brains, a map to it etched with the passing of millennia.”

The flatwoods salamander, a member of the longleaf pine ecosystem, makes a yearly pilgrimage to its breeding grounds based on a millennia-old map within its mind. As construction and development alters the landscape, this map becomes useless, and the salamanders are unable to return to their breeding grounds and reproduce.

“[Daddy] could not have survived losing one of us, he knew, so he was afraid. Irrationally afraid. He guarded us like a warden—exactly like a warden—and he taught us always to think of safety first and to be prepared for the worst and not to trust and always to be afraid.” 

Daddy is overly protective of his children, afraid to leave them alone and teaching them how to use guns so as to protect themselves. Ray believes that Daddy is acting out of a deep-seated, irrational fear, as Daddy believes he would not be able to handle their passing away. 

“Fire repressed the advance of woody shrubs, which are wont to move out of swamps and colonize savannas, and created a blank slate upon which plants flourished anew […] The absence of fire results in the elimination of bog species.” 

The pine savannas are a bog ecosystem connected to the longleaf pine forests, which similarly evolve to rely on fire for their survival. Without periodic fires, dense plants would colonize the savannas, and the diverse and unique species that live in the pine savannas would die out.

“‘You never terminate the forest; you terminate individual trees,’ Leon says. ‘You never regenerate the forest; you regenerate individual trees.’” 

Leon Neel is a logger who has developed a sustainable system for logging wood from pine forests. By only logging select, unhealthy trees, Neel believes that longleaf pine forests can survive while still yielding financial profits for the land’s owners. 

“The scene was a metaphor for my arrival into the world, the real world—me standing at cliff’s edge, unable even to imagine the route down.” 

In college, Ray begins to experiment and experience things that had previously been forbidden of her due to a strict religious upbringing. One night, she joins a group of rebellious friends and rappels down a cliff in total darkness. Ray describes the scene as a metaphor for her entry into the real world: blindly leaping without any sense of where she is going. 

“We loved the same things—poetry and the woods. Aloud across a campfire we read Walt Whitman, and when we described the lives we wanted, our desires were the same: to live simply, close to nature, to grow and collect our own food, to use plants as medicines, to be as self-sufficient as possible.”

Ray befriends an older “mountain woman” in her field botany class, who serves as a model for being a woman. Unlike Mama’s dependency on Daddy, this mountain woman exhibits independence and self-sufficiency as she learns to live off the land.