I have been reading more Janisse Ray and have now finished all of her books that we own. We actually had one that I hadn't read before that ended up being my favorite, Wildcard Quilt.
In this book, Ray talks about her decision to go back home to Baxley, Georgia, and live on the family farm, and it is just so damn good. Her writing started off really damn good, but it has gotten even better by this book. In her first book, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, she juxtaposes chapters about growing up in the rural South with short chapters about natural history facts: what animals and plants used to live in the area where she grew up or how fire sustained longleaf pine forests or how many acres of it spread across the South. These chapters are historical, factual, naturalistic, textbooky. In Wildcard, all that same kind of information is there, but it's integrated into the narrative; there's no separation, and I think the story is better for it.
I am floored by the commonalities between my life and Ray's. Maybe it's because there's only so many trajectories that raised in conservative, repressive, religious South with rigidly enforced gender and racial roles can take, but once we both escaped, we did a lot of the same things: became atheists for a while, decided that we're not atheists because there's too much wonder in the world and too much bigger than we are and too much ineffable (although we continue to reject organized religion and especially the religion of our upbringing), continue to be moved by the music and the passion of the religion of our upbringing even while not believing in it, incurred familial rejection/disapproval over our politics/religious choices/shacking up with dudes, healed the rift with babies.
Even though she wrote Wildcard long before our current political situation, so much of what she says in it is particularly relevant right now. What does it mean to be progressive (in terms of caring about the environment and believing in the equality of the sexes and the races) and then to come back to live in a place that often is not? What does it mean for a place when everyone who is progressive leaves as soon as they're old enough to get the hell out of dodge? What does it mean when people looking from the outside think that everyone in a place is bigoted and small-minded and ignorant when they aren't?
Ray writes about coming home and looking for healing and finding fragmentation instead; she writes about being heartsick and watching the natural and human community she's come back to being destroyed. She writes about not having her intellectual and emotional needs met. But then she writes about being open and meeting people and finding the writers in her rural area and the naturalists and the environmentalists and the people who care and the activists and the people who aren't bigoted and the book ends with her starting to piece the fragments into a whole.
It's so easy for people who live in progressive places to be very disdainful of those of us who live in conservative areas. Why don't you just leave? Forgetting all of the other very salient reasons we don't just leave, as Ray points out, what happens to this place if we do? Do we abandon our home to negative forces? Do we give up and say our home isn't worth saving?
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The Complete Poems 1927-1979 by Elizabeth Bishop
Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto by Kevin M. Gannon
