Category: Books

Years ago, my son Connor and I went on a hiking trip with my dad. At some point along the trail, we stopped to rest, and he told us about something from his past that he’d never talked about before. Namely, that in high school, he once had a part-time job delivering ice. Not those bags of ice people today buy at the grocery store before a party, but blocks of ice that people would put in their ice-box, the precursor to the modern refrigerator.

Of course, his story was not a total surprise. I knew that my grandfather—Connor’s great-grandfather—had owned an ice factory in rural Mississippi, where my father’s family is from. And my father had been in high school in the late 1950s, when much of that part of the country was still lagging several decades behind in terms of technology. Still, my father’s tales of hauling blocks of ice up tenement stairwells impressed me, as did his description of the blocks themselves, which were notched into thirds. This was done so that poorer people could buy a third or perhaps two-thirds of a whole block. All that was needed was to cleave the block with a small hatchet, which my father had carried with him for this purpose.

I found myself thinking about these stories a lot as I read a memoir by my old professor—the great writer Harry Crews—called A Childhood: The Biography of a Place. Like most good memoirs, the book gives the reader a window into a time and a place that is now long gone. In Crews’s case, it was Bacon County, Georgia in the Great Depression, when poor farmers had a skillset that seems almost fantastic to our modern sensibilities. Take, for instance, this passage, in which Crews describes the technical and highly prized ability to estimate the age (and, thus, the mileage) of a mule:

A mule has a full set of teeth when he’s born. But when he is two years old, he sheds two of the teeth right in the front. A good mule man can tell if he’s shed those two front teeth, in which case he is between two and three years old. A really good man can tell if those teeth have just grown back in or if they’ve been back in the mule’s mouth for several months. The next year, when he’s three, the mule sheds two more teeth, one on each side of the two he shed the year before. From then on the mule sheds two teeth a year until he’s five years old. That’s the last time he sheds.

Reading this passage, I was struck—as I was on that day with my father and my son—by how much the texture of daily life has changed in the past one hundred years. How one human lifetime (Harry Crews’s and also my father’s) could span the era of mule men and ice-delivery boys to my own, in which I make my living programming a computer (an occupation as complicated, surely, as appraising a mule’s age, but not nearly as artful). 

Not all of Crews’s memoir is as comfortingly rustic as the sample above. Crews was never guilty of sentimentality in his writing, and his description of his family and neighbors enduring desperate poverty are as horrifying as any I have ever read. To name just one example, he explains how a problem as mundane as a rotten tooth—a mere annoyance for us today—was an agonizing crisis in rural Georgia, where no dentists were available and no one could afford them even if they were. So, naturally, people were driven by relentless pain to pull their own teeth, as Crews witnessed a hired man do one night:

He had a piece of croker sack about the size of a half dollar in his left hand and a pair of wire pliers in his right. He spat the water out and reached way back in his rotten mouth and put the piece of sack over a tooth. He braced his feet against the well and stuck the pliers in over the sackcloth. He took the pliers in both hands, and immediately a forked vein leaped in his forehead. The vein in his neck popped big as a pencil. He pulled and twisted and pulled and never made a sound.

It’s this kind of detail that makes one appreciate the mercies of modern life, even as it vaporizes any nostalgia we might harbor for the so-called “good old days” that right-wing politicians are always blathering about. For Crews, the “good old days” were marked by disease, privation, hunger, and lethal violence. They were also marked by unexpected moments of kindness, decency, and courage. People helped each other out in times of need without any thought of recompense; it was simply the way of things.

As Crews writes:

Back in the county there was no charity. People gave things to each other, peas because they couldn’t sell them or use them, same with tomatoes, sweet corn, milk, and sometimes even a piece of meat because it was going to turn rank in the smokehouse before they could eat it. But nothing was made out of giving or receiving. It was never called charity or even a gift. It was just the natural order of things for people whose essential problem, first and last, was survival.

Clearly, hard times bring out both the worst and the best in human nature. But there is an even deeper lesson to draw from Crews’s narrative. Namely, that physical suffering can deepen and intensify the human spirit. I was particularly struck by the chapter in which Crews describes the time he was stricken by polio as a small boy. As he lay in bed, paralyzed, he was kept company by an African-American woman called “Auntie” who regaled him with stories of backwoods monsters and superstitions, which both entranced and terrified him. For instance, she warned him of a bird’s ability to spit in a person’s mouth and take over their body.

“Look in there, youngun,” she said. “Look in there and bleve. A bird mought take you to hell. Mought take you anywheres at all. Me, I been grieved more than some, you up here in the house with them birds. Them spittin like snakes, lookin to hit you all up in your mouf. One hit you—an one gone hit you—that bird own you, own all of you. Now you look in there an bleve.” Her old soft voice got sharp when she demanded that I believe. But she could have saved it; I’d been a righteous believer in the deadly accuracy of bird spit long before we came down the hall. “Bird spit mix all up with your spit, and then your spit is his and he’s you. You listening, chile?”

Crews never comes out and says it, but there is a strong implication that it was the power of Auntie’s imagination, and those of others like her, that fostered a desire in him to be a writer. The same was true of the place itself—Bacon County—whose very harshness gave him an appreciation of the miraculous divinity of all things. “I had already learned—without knowing I’d learned it—that every single thing in the world was full of mystery and awesome power.” What better description could there be of the artistic impulse? The need to capture the sublime and terrifying experience of daily life?

My appreciation of A Childhood is undoubtedly tinged by the fact that I got to know Harry Crews for a while. By the time I became an English major at the University of Florida in the 1980s, Crews was already a legend. He had written a lot of great books, of course, but he was more famous locally as a teacher and all-around character. Everyone seemed to have a Harry Crews story. He got into brawls. He took drugs. There was the time he had once (allegedly) tackled an irate student who had attempted to storm out of his class. He studied karate. He caught and raised hawks. He trained body-builders. He wrote five-hundred words a day, even if it took him three hours of sitting at keyboard, staring.

And he drank. A lot.

As a bright-eyed, wannabe writer, I was enthralled with the idea of Harry Crews. But by the time I finally signed up for his creative writing class—a night class, obviously, since he wrote in the mornings—the old Harry of lore was already in the past. He’d given up drinking (he took Antabuse daily), and he’d mellowed out. But he was still a legend. He produced one fine novel after another, and he made a lot of money writing for big-name magazines like Playboy. One of his most notable fans was Madonna, who would only agree to be the focus of a celebrity study in Playboy if Harry were the journalist. So, Harry flew to Manhattan and spent a few days with the Queen of Pop and her then-husband, Sean Penn (who also became a fan).

And yet, as awed as I was that fall evening when I sat in a classroom with a dozen other nervous students, I still had no idea what Harry Crews looked like. Then, at exactly six-o’clock, a lank man in faded jeans shuffled into the room, slightly stooped and smiling. For whatever reason, he looked at me first, sharp grey eyes fixing on me. He nodded and said, “Hey, guy,” a gentle greeting that I have often used. He then proceeded to teach a class that was ostensibly about the writing craft but more directly about the importance of fine art and the dedication required to create it.

My only regret about reading Crews’s memoir after all these years is that I didn’t do so sooner. It would have given me even more appreciation for the man. After all, most people who have the kind of childhood grow up to be hard, violent individuals. And, indeed, Crews wrote hard, violent novels, filled with men and women for whom brutality is a way of life. But the author himself–once you got to know him–was a bit of a sweetheart. I’ve been told that Harry wasn’t always so sweet, in his youth, but he was when I knew him, and so that’s the Harry I remember: a man who felt that all human beings deserve sympathy, but especially the most underprivileged and marginalized. He also knew of the power of imagination and storytelling to sustain us even in the most desperate of circumstances. As Crews says of his beloved Auntie and her bizarre superstitions, “Fantasy might not be truth as the world counts it, but what was truth when fantasy meant survival?”

P.S. Here’s a review of A Childhood recently published in the New Yorker.

(Author’s Note: this post originally appeared on my old blog, Bakhtin’s Cigarettes.)