A Childhood: The Biography of a Place

piA Childhood/i 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 sharecroppers 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.brbrAt once shocking and elegiac heartrending and comical iA Childhood/i not only recalls the transforming events of Crewss 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."brbrAmid portraits of relatives and neighbors Bacon County lore and details of farm life Crews tells of his fathers death; his friendship with Willalee Bookatee the son of a black hired hand; his bout with polio; his mother and stepfathers 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 Crewss childhood world: "its people and its customs and all its loveliness and all its ugliness." Imaginative and gripping iA Childhood/i re-creates in detail one writers search for past and self a search for a time and place lost forever except in memory./p