Wild Card Quilt

You can't go home again (Thomas Wolfe) - or can you?. Maybe not to the actual house that you grew up in, not move back in with your parents, but go back to the greater home of community and small town and nearby family. In her memoir, Wild Card Quilt - Taking a Chance on Home, Janisse Ray goes home to rural Georgia at the age of 35. She moved into her grandmother's farm house, empty these 5 years since her death…

"after Grandmama died…I sat in her swept yard, listening to stories while neighbors brought chicken and dumplings, pans of rolls, pound cakes…"

Janisse gives us a delightful collection of stories - of life in the small town of Baxley, Georgia, of life on the farm, stories of family and community, of her passion for saving the forests where she grew up. The chapter titles themselves give great insight into the story - Calico Scraps, Log Trucks at the Crossroads, The Bread Man Still Stops in Osierfield.

I was first drawn to the book by the quilt references. Janisse and her mother together make a quilt, the ritual of going through the calico scraps and finding the perfect matches to tell her quilt story, of layering the quilt and batting and back - "it was like making a pie - crust, filling, crust" - of trying to set up the quilt frame (and hearing her ghostly Grandmama laughing every time it fell):

"a ghost is like a quilt in that both are made of stories, both are made to wear out, both represent a life spent, and those parts left behind"

But more often is mentioned the importance of the stories that bind together the neighbors and family, stories to collect and tell and pass down through the generations. She tells of preserving the old ways, of saving seeds from the garden for next year, alligator trapping, making quilts, and having a cane-syrup boiling.

"In south Georgia our sweetener is cane syrup, boiled from the pressed juice of sugarcane… we sop it up with hot biscuits and pour it over griddle cakes and wet our cornbread with it".

I love these stories of rural Georgia, I can identify with so many of them, well except for maybe this one about catching a gator that made me laugh out loud:

"This is more fun than eating boiled peanuts naked on the courthouse lawn."

Her beautiful descriptions take me back to my childhood, reminding me once again what a beautiful place we live, uncrowded, acres of forest all around, reminded me of the importance of community and family and history and of course the stories. We must preserve the stories.

"Perhaps stories keep us as a people in place glued together. As the stories vanish or are lost - as people depart homeplaces, as the landscapes are destroyed - no new stories form to replace them. Without the stories that fasten us each to each, the web that is community commences to unravel, its threads flapping in the wind, finally tearing loose completely and wafting away." ( )

It is said that you can never step twice in the same river—the water is always moving, it is always a new river before you. For the same reason, Thomas Wolfe said you can’t go home again. You are never the same person returning that you were when you left, and those you left behind, are no longer quite the people you knew.

That doesn’t stop us from trying, though. It definitely didn’t stop Janisse Ray, who after fleeing her family’s rural Georgia farm years earlier, returned to seek the home she had spent most of her life looking for. Wild Card Quilt is her account of both her exodus and her homecoming, although she freely admits that the community she came back to was no longer the “home” she remembered. That was fine—she expected there to be change. People grow older. New buildings are built while older ones fall into disrepair. What she was not sure of, however, was whether things had changed so much she would no longer be able to find what she was seeking: a less fragmented, more meaningful way of life, with kith and kin around her; a sense of wholeness.

This country has seen an exodus of people leaving their rural homes to live in cities where there are more opportunities for a better life. It is the small towns of America, its much-idealized farming communities that have suffered the most. Ray returns to find, not an apple-pie and Sunday-come-to-meeting America, but a fractured community, one that had been irrevocably harmed by the loss of so many of its sons and daughters.

Ray, whose first memoir Ecology of a Cracker Childhood fixed her reputation as one of the South’s most vivid and poetic nature writers, turns her careful and usually compassionate eye upon her family and her hometown neighbors with equal parts affection and sadness. Wild Card Quilt is a series of loosely related stories and memories of her grandmother’s farm—now abandoned to Ray’s own intentions and desires.

From the moment she steps up onto the dusty front porch and nearly breaks the key in the stiff lock of the warped door, the author is overwhelmed by a sense of the fragility of the way of life she has come back to. This is not only a community with the strength of familial bonds that go back generations. It is an eroded place, held together by stories and memories: “…a shaking cobweb strung between a leaky house and a wind-torn barn”.