The Home Place (2016)
J. Drew Lanham
217 pages
In The Home Place, J. Drew Lanham reflects on the deep and abiding love of the natural world that he developed growing up in western South Carolina. More poignantly, he goes on to explore the realities of American society that confronted him when he embraced this passion as a career, as captured by the book’s subtitle: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature. (Emphasis in the original, as can be seen in the cover photo at left.)
Lanham spends the first half of the book describing his up-bringing on his family’s homestead – the Home Place of the title – a mix of farmland and forest. He writes loving portraits of his parents, and of his grandmother, who had a separate house on the Home Place, and with whom he lived for much of his youth. His parents taught in the local school system and farmed the land of the Home Place, a combination of occupations that helped instill in their son a passion for observing and understanding the natural world. His grandmother’s more visceral connection to the flora and fauna of the Home Place clearly also hoped awakened in Lanham a profound awareness of the world’s wonder and mystery.
At Clemson University, Lanham first studied Mechanical Engineering. But the truth will out, and in his junior year, he notes “I … reversed the course of my destiny,” (138) shifting focus to the biological sciences building on campus, and a path that eventually led to doctoral studies in Ornithology and a position as an Alumni Distinguished Professor of Wildlife Ecology at Clemson.
The courage to make such a dramatic shift presages his ability to deal with the challenges that he came to encounter with his new vocation, and that he describes in moderate but resolute prose in the second half of his memoir. Moving beyond the borders and familial security of the Home Place to pursue his research in the natural world, he discovers wonders aplenty, “moved to tears by the beauty of snow capped peaks” (178) and “devoured by remnant forests that from far away look uniformly verdant but from within are every shade of green imaginable … a living breathing thing.” (179) Unfortunately, however, these marvels come paired with an uglier side, and not simply the threat from grizzly bears and wolves. As innocuous as birding might appear at first glance, Lanham discovers the profoundly disquieting reality of, as one of his chapter titles labels it, Birding While Black.
At times these dangers and associated fears have concrete form. But perhaps more damaging is the constant mental distraction of feeling that one stands out, in situations which someone who is white would not give a second, or even first, thought. It's an experience Cathy Park Hong refers to as
the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one’s perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed. Minor feelings arise, for instance, upon hearing a slight, knowing it’s racial, and being told, Oh, that’s all in your head. (55, Minor Feelings, my review linked to at right)
Hong goes on to describe the crazy-making reality of wondering whether her concerns are real in any given moment or encounter. Lanham asks similar questions, including in situations in which getting it wrong could have a deadly result, the stakes raising one’s thoughts to an exhaustingly persistent fever pitch.
And so, a memoir about Lanham’s profound love of nature becomes a clear-eyed, powerful revelation of race relations and experiences in America today. It can be easy for the majority to assume that the civil rights movement resolved these issues, that they are now largely things of the past; certainly, one shouldn’t ignore the advances that have been made since the middle of the 20th century. But Lanham’s memoir makes clear, as does Hong’s and a deafening drumbeat of other personal accounts and stories and images, that much work remains to be done to get to a uniform level of life experience without fear. Ignoring or dismissing that reality will only extend the time required to shift American society to a better, more socially sustainable place for all.
Other notes and information:
I first heard of Lanham, and his book, in his wonderful interview with Krista Tippett for her program On Being.
Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf
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