Wild Card Quilt : The Ecology of Home

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Summary: prophetic, poetic, passionate: Ray's ecology inspires
Review: If Janisse Ray's first memoir, "Ecology of a Cracker Childhood," is an evocative reclamation of a treasured Southern ecological system, her sequel, "Wild Card Quilt" emerges as a moving, inspiring and passionate attempt to reclaim her adult life. Ray's poetic prose is part autobiography, part self-identification with place and part manifesto. Her writing soars with exquisite metaphor and astounding revelation. She is unapologetic in her defense of the longleaf pine ecosystem and convincing in her appeals for Americans to redefine the very nature of our national character. "Wild Card Quilt" required courage to write, and Ray more than met the challenge. Years from now, she will be recognized as instrumental to late twentieth-century ecology as Rachel Carson was some half-century earlier.

After having fled her restrictive and repressive childhood home in rural Georgia, Ray discovers herself adrift and alienated as an adult. A single mother of an inquisitive and sensitive son, her spiritual restlessness compels her to return to her grandmother's isolated shotgun cabin and reclaim her life. In so doing, she rediscovers her fervent, but latent, identification with the disappearing longleaf pine forests of the Southeast. As she had in "Cracker Childhood," Ray provides masterful descriptions of this endangered ecology, lavishing as much love on the richly interdependent plant and animal life as she does on the family and community with which she interlaces herself in Baxley, Georgia.

Firmly linking herself with those social critics of American life who decry our culture's obsession with consumption and lack of identification with nature, Ray agrees with Paul Gruchow's conclusion that "we raise our most capable rural children...to expect that as soon as possible they will leave." Against this diaspora, Ray launches numerous campaigns, not only to preserve the ecology of her home, but the social structure groaning under the pressures of eradication in the name of jobs, progress and consumption.

As moving as her political polemics are, Ray reserves her best writing in portraying her people. Likening her family to homemade pure cane syrup, Ray surmises, "It's sweetness that keeps people together. Sweetness. The sweetness of our tongues, of kind words, of praise." But not only that. It is also the "sweetness, too, of acts of imagination and love." Quiet, nearly invisible kin earn her respect. Her reclusive uncle Percy, "not a man to reach out...or...demand much from life," through Ray's characterization, gains enormous dignity from his modesty. Percy, who excels at attending church and mowing the lawn, is as "extreme in his quiescence as Hemingway had been in his ardor to eat life's marrow." Content to allow life to come to him, "Percy nibbled at the crust."

From her mother, whose labors produce the quilt which gives the memoir its title, arises a sense of beauty that fits with Ray's defense of rural life. Her mother's quilts originate from "necessity, using rags and torn clothes." To Ray, "the need for usefulness...produces objects of the greatest beauty." The adult Ray has a kinder, more forgiving understanding of her father's psychology. Never giving in to his rigidity, she forgives him, and in so doing, opens the door for his reconciliation with Ray's oldest sister, with whom he had been estranged for nearly two decades.

Towering above everything in "Wild Card Quilt" is Janisse Ray's unabashed sense of hope. This infectious optimism, infused with deep conviction and enormous compassion, may align itself with our nation's longstanding sense of hope and vision. As the author becomes increasingly integrated in her Baxley environment, as she becomes ever more passionate in her advocacy for the longleaf pine forests, as she plants her own taproot deep in the fertile soils of family love and community solidarity, she outlines not only a personal blueprint of redemption, but a national one as well.