Small and Smaller

John Lane — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 07:47:22 -0500

My writer/activist friend Janisse Ray has recently written an essay called "Bleeding Fields," all about rural exodus in the South. Janisse grew up in Baxley, a small farming town in south Georgia. Though she wasn't raised on a farm (her father ran a junk yard), her grandparents were still on the land just outside of town all through her girlhood. She grew up eating home-grown okra and tomatoes. She knew the smell of tilled fields, could recognize a chicken shack and a mule. She grew up believing in small communities like Baxley and the surrounding rural culture that supported them.