A Childhood: The Biography of a Place

by Harry Crews

Michael McCurdy (Illustrator)

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 in the middle of the Great Depression, in a one-room sharecropper's cabin at the end of a dirt road in 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 in 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 in 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 in Jacksonville, Florida. These and other memories define, with reverence and affection, Harry Crews's childhood world: "its people and its customs and all its loveliness and all its ugliness." Imaginative and gripping, A Childhood re-creates in detail one writer's search for past and self, a search for a time and place lost forever except in memory.

• ISBN13: 9780820317595
• Publish Date: 31 October 1995 (first published 28 August 1979)
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 4 February 2021
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: University of Georgia Press
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 192
• Language: English

Reviews

[jamiereadthis]

Two parts Larry Brown, two parts Wendell Berry, two parts William Gay, two parts the kinds of places and people and stories I’ve had all my life.

This was so special to me. Life-giving, in a way. For all the stories and family histories I have heard, so much of it has been lost. So much of it I’ll never hear. This was like getting to find the pieces of it I might not otherwise, to borrow those shoes from someone else for a while and imagine my own people in them. That’s essentially what Harry Crews is doing here anyway: finding the pieces of his past he’s lost.

“I come from people who believe the home place is as vital and necessary as the beating of your own heart. It is that single house where you were born, where you lived out your childhood, where you grew into young manhood. It is your anchor in the world, that place, along with the memory of your kinsmen at the long supper table every night and the knowledge that it would always exist, if nowhere but in memory.”

It’s tremendous. It’s the south, through and through: all of its people and its customs and its loveliness and ugliness. And it’s all stories, stories, stories. As we live and breathe.

“I had already learned— without knowing I’d learned it— that every single thing in the world was full of mystery and awesome power. And it was only by the right way of doing things— ritual ways— that kept any of us safe. Making stories about them was not so that we could understand them but so that we could live with them. It all made perfect sense to me. Fantasy might not be truth as the world counts it, but what was truth when fantasy meant survival?”