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BOOKS I READ: A Childhood: The Biography of a Place by Harry Crews (1978). Crew’s childhood straddles the border, Bacon County, Georgia and Jacksonville, Florida. Tobacco, farming and production, provides for subsistence living to the families we meet. Crews’s memoir is like listening to Creedence Clearwater Revival. Their sound—and his writing— so effective at placing you in the humid and swampy backwaters of the south.
Much of the first part of the book is a longing for his Daddy, whom he hardly knows. Crews starts with a memory from ten years before his birth, a story about his Daddy heard often enough to feel like his own recollection. Uncle Alton and the Bookatees, Black tenant famers, offer threadbare hope during his difficult early years. He is no fortunate son. Crews is first paralyzed by an illness that makes his legs useless and then is severely burned when he falls into a pot being used to scald the hides of slaughtered hogs.
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