A Childhood: The Biography of a Place by Harry Crews

A hard-living son of the South who wrote like an angel

Anyone who's read a Harry Crews novel doesn't need me to tell them what an incredible writer this guy was. I'd never, until now, gotten around to reading his memoir A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, probably because it had fallen out of print for some time and first-edition copies were pricey. When I saw the new Penguin reprint at a local bookstore, I had to pick it up.

Review

It's a short book (174 pages in the Penguin edition) and a fast read. Except for a couple of brief skips forward in time, it only covers the author's life up until around age six. But what an eventful six years they were! Harry Crews was born in the Deep South in the middle of the Great Depression, and his early years chronicle a harsh level of poverty that is hard for most of us to imagine today. For many in the rural South during the Depression and World War II, electricity and flush toilets were marvels heard about but not experienced. Even the world-expanding miracle of radio was unavailable to the desperately poor. I often wonder how a few people who come from such limited circumstances are able to become such fine writers. That in itself is a miracle and a mystery not amenable to explanation.

A theme that runs through much of the book is Crews' early-childhood love of storytelling, both the hearing and the doing of it. A tenant family of black farmers lived on the land where Crews grew up, and his best friend at that time was their little boy, Willalee. Harry, Willalee, and Willalee's little sister Lottie Mae would entertain themselves by sitting on the floor with the Sears "wish book" and making up stories about the flawless people in that catalog, with their perfect clothes and many possessions. "The federal government ought to strike a medal for the Sears, Roebuck company for sending all those catalogs to farming families, for bringing all that color and all that mystery and all that beauty into the lives of country people."

The old woman who lived with Willalee's family was known to all as Auntie. While his mama, Myrtice, would never deign to cook possum (it's "just like a buzzard"), the way Auntie made it was the best thing Harry ever tasted -- first parboiled, then stuffed with sweet potatoes and baked in the oven. Auntie was the only adult who would join the children in making up stories about the people in the Sears, Roebuck catalog. "Auntie was too strange -- weird even -- for the big people. She belonged with children, being as she was, full of the most fantastic stories and marvelous comments upon the way of the world and all things in it, whether of the earth or air." When Harry was bedridden because of a terrible accident that left burns all over his body, Auntie would sit up with him for hours and tell him stories. "She loved to talk about anything with snakes in it," he wrote. Auntie's often grotesque and fantastical stories made a deep impression on the young writer-to-be.

Harry's daddy had died when Harry was only two years old. His mama then married his father's brother, Pascal. Harry admired Pascal greatly, but his new father eventually became too enamored with whiskey and would disappear for weeks at a time. When he returned, loud and often violent fights would often ensue between his mama Myrtice and Pascal. One night, the fight ended in Pascal firing a shotgun into the mantlepiece, narrowly missing Myrtice. she gathered up the boys, left the house, and moved to Jacksonville, Florida, where she got a job in the King Edward Cigar Factory spreading tobacco leaves flat on a metal plate so they could be filled and then rolled. Harry never went back to the farm or saw Willalee and Auntie again. In Jacksonville, Harry became friends with a boy named Junior Lister, who taught him the art of stealing and selling ill-gotten goods. When the stealing got too dangerous, Harry talked his way into a job sweeping up sawdust in the back of a butcher shop; but the job didn't last a day. A man ran into the shop, grabbed a butcher knife from the knife block, and stabbed himself to death with it while Harry stood there watching with his broom in hand. "You don't have to worry about this," the man told the frightened boy as he was dying.

"Why?" I said.
"The knife feels good."
"Godamighty," I said.

Amongst the book's many tales of desperate people doing desperate things to survive, here was one who decided to give up. "I'm through with it all now," he concluded. "Somebody else gone have to look after it."

Five months after moving to Jacksonville, Harry's mama moved back to Georgia with him and his brother and made a down payment on a small farm not far from where they'd lived before. The memoir relates some of the events that happened after Myrtice and the boys moved to the small farm, hired a hand named Mr. Willis, and bought an old mule named Pete; but it does not go much beyond that point. Crews joined the Marines during the Korean War and was able to get a college education thanks to the G.I. Bill. At the very end, Crews briefly relates a story of coming back to visit his kin in Bacon County, Georgia, and realizing that he had grown apart from the place but that the place would always be a part of him.

I think the most powerful writing in the book comes in chapter 10, which tells the story of the terrible fight which led to Harry's mama gathering up the boys in the middle of the night and walking with them to her brother Alton's place. It goes on to recount the shocks of adjustment that came with leaving behind a rural life that could have belonged to the previous century and moving to a city with running water and flush toilets, neighbors living side by side in row houses and apartment buildings, mothers going off to work in a factory, and children roaming the streets on their own. "The only way to deal with the real world was to challenge it with one of your own making," Crews wrote. "For a long time after that, the next six months, from March to August, lived in my memory as a series of scenes, flashes of actions lit down to the most brutal detail under a blinding light." It would be hard to find a better description of the work Harry Crews left behind.