A childhood, the biography of a place

Abstract

A Childhood is the unforgettable memoir of Harry Crews' earliest years, a sharply remembered portrait of the people, locales, and circumstances that shaped him--and destined him to be a storyteller. Crews was born the middle of the Great Depression, a one-room sharecropper's cabin at the end of a dirt road rural South Georgia. If Bacon County was a place of grinding poverty, poor soil, and blood feuds, it was also a deeply mystical place, where snakes talked, birds could possess a small boy by spitting his mouth, and faith healers and conjure women kept ghosts and devils at bay.At once shocking and elegiac, heartrending and comical, A Childhood not only recalls the transforming events of Crews's youth but conveys his growing sense of self a world in which survival depended on raw courage, a courage born out of desperation and sustained by a lack of alternatives.Amid portraits of relatives and neighbors, Bacon County lore, and details of farm life, Crews tells of his father's death; his friendship with Willalee Bookatee, the son of a black hired hand; his bout with polio; his mother and stepfather's failing marriage; his near-fatal scalding at a hog-killing; and a five-month sojourn Jacksonville, Florida. These and other memories define, with reverence and affection, Harry Crews's childhood world: people and its customs and all its loveliness and all its ugliness. Imaginative and gripping, A Childhood re-creates detail one writer's search for past and self, a search for a time and place lost forever except memory.

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