Hugely influential across the globe. Drew Lanham draws special inspiration from Leopold’s work into his own professional life, and also his caring worldview. The Home Place also stands in distinct parallel to Jahren’s book, an international bestseller. Lanham and Jahren both chronicle the struggle to become respected scientists and, in. Overview From the fertile soils of love, land, identity, family, and race emerges The Home Place, a big-hearted, unforgettable memoir by ornithologist J. Dating back to slavery, Edgefield County, South Carolina—a place “easy to pass by on the way somewhere else”—has been home to generations of Lanhams. From these fertile soils of love, land, identity, family, and race emerges The Home Place, a big-hearted, unforgettable memoir by ornithologist and professor of ecology J. Dating back to slavery, Edgefield County, South Carolina-a place 'easy to pass by on the way somewhere else'-has been home to generations of Lanhams. From these fertile soils—of love, land, identity, family, and race—emerges The Home Place, a big-hearted, unforgettable memoir by ornithologist J. Dating back to slavery, Edgefield County, South Carolina—a place “easy to pass by on the way to somewhere else”—has been home to generations of Lanhams.
THE HOME PLACE: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature.By J. Milkweed Editions. It’s no surprise that many of our most celebrated lovers of the land.
Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature
From the fertile soils of love, land, identity, family, and race emerges The Home Place, a big-hearted, unforgettable memoir by ornithologist J. Drew Lanham.
Dating back to slavery, Edgefield County, South Carolina—a place “easy to pass by on the way somewhere else”—has been home to generations of Lanhams. In The Home Place, readers meet these extraordinary people, including Drew himself, who over the course of the 1970s falls in love with the natural world around him. As his passion takes flight, however, he begins to ask what it means to be “the rare bird,
From the fertile soils of love, land, identity, family, and race emerges The Home Place, a big-hearted, unforgettable memoir by ornithologist J. Drew Lanham.
Dating back to slavery, Edgefield County, South Carolina—a place “easy to pass by on the way somewhere else”—has been home to generations of Lanhams. In The Home Place, readers meet these extraordinary people, including Drew himself, who over the course of the 1970s falls in love with the natural world around him. As his passion takes flight, however, he begins to ask what it means to be “the rare bird, the oddity.”
By turns angry, funny, elegiac, and heartbreaking, The Home Place is a remarkable meditation on nature and belonging, at once a deeply moving memoir and riveting exploration of the contradictions of black identity in the rural South—and in America today.
less …Drew Lanham Books
- Milkweed Editions
- Hardcover
- September 2016
- 232 Pages
- 9781571313157
About J Drew Lanham
J. Drew Lanham is a native of Edgefield, South Carolina, and an Alumni Distinguished Professor of Wildlife Ecology and Master Teacher at Clemson University. Lanham is a birder, naturalist, and hunter-conservationist who has published essays and poetry in publications including Orion, Flycatcher, and Wilderness, and in several anthologies, including The Colors of Nature, State of the Heart, Bartram’s Living Legacy, and Carolina Writers at Home, among others. He and his family live in the Upstate of South Carolina, a soaring hawk’s downhill glide from the southern Appalachian escarpment that the Cherokee once called the Blue Wall.
Praise
“Consider this required reading—it’s a thoughtful and relevant-as-ever look at race and identity in the great outdoors.”—Outside
“A beautifully rendered and deeply personal story of the complex geographies of home, and displacement. The Home Place is a deft examination of how we come to define ourselves in a world that, in turn, is relentlessly trying to define who we are—and how we can take those definitions over and make our own.”—Sierra Magazine
“A groundbreaking work about race and the American landscape, and a deep meditation on nature, selfhood, and the nature of home. It is thoughtful, sincere, wise, and beautiful. I want everyone to read it.”—Helen Macdonald, author of H Is for Hawk
Discussion Questions
1. In an increasingly urbanized society, what is the value of wild places? Where does our fascination with wild things come from? Why are we drawn to them?
2. Is a connection to the outdoors essential to connect to place? What does this book offer to someone living in an urban environment?
3. Consider Lanham’s introduction and the chapter “Birding While Black.” How does Lanham consider the ways his identity has been called into question because of where he comes from and the profession he has chosen?
4. How does Lanham’s vocation as a scientist and a birder shape his view of his home place? How would his view differ if he had chosen a different profession?
5. Ornithology informs Lanham’s view of the natural world and his place in it? How does studying creatures of the air flavor his relationship with earthbound things?
6. Lanham writes, “My hope is that somehow I might move others to find themselves magnified in nature, whomever and wherever they might be” (6). What does being magnified in nature mean to you?
7. Lanham’s grandmother, Mamatha, loved gardening and thought very highly of the remedies she made from the plants. From vegetables to flowers, what is it about gardening that gives us joy and fulfillment?
8. Lanham’s descriptions of the Home Place and Mamatha’s Ramshackle are drawn through his relationships with various members of his family. How much of the places that mean something to us are a result of the people that inhabit them? Is home a physical place or is it the community that occupies that place?
9. The Home Place exists at the intersection of numerous boundaries: ecological, social, racial, economic. His hometown is called Edgefield, after all. Where do you see these edges in the book? How does his engagement with these boundaries form his relationship with his history, his family’s land, and what their future as a family looks like?
10. Mamatha has no trouble embracing both the supernatural and the Christian world, and this approach clearly has effected Lanham’s approach to the world. Where do you see these kinds of seemingly opposing worldviews that nevertheless intersect usefully in your life?
11. For children today, who are often not allowed to go to a park by themselves, how could we recreate an experience like Lanham’s free range childhood on the Home Place?
12. Often our family history affects the way we act in the world ourselves, how does this play out in Lanham’s situation: Where the land was worked by his ancestors as slaves and his family history previous to three generations ago is almost entirely unknown?
Reviewed by Cate Hodorowicz
In recent years, scholars and activists have started to question why and how, as geographer Carolyn Finney writes, “we have come to understand/see/envision the environmental debate as shaped and inhabited primarily by white people.”
J. Drew Lanham’s outstanding memoir, The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature (Milkweed Editions, Reprint June 2017), engages this problem as he considers what it means to be a person of color who feels at home in America’s wild places. A professor of wildlife ecology, an ornithologist, and a nature writer, Lanham as a black man works in almost exclusively white fields. With grace and a keen humanity, his book offers a ground-breaking addition to the dialogue about race, place, and the environment.
The Home Place Drew Lanham Sparknotes
Lanham’s love of the land and its creatures begins on his schoolteacher parents’ Edgefield, South Carolina farm. Young Drew tramps The Home Place’s fields and forests, and it’s no wonder he later devotes his life to nature:
In every nook and cranny—a stump hole, a dry creek bed, or a burrow in the ground— there was something furred, feathered, finned, or scaled that scurried, swan, or flew . . . [I] learned the signs of the wild souls I seldom actually saw: the delicate doglike trace of a fox; the handlike pawprints of raccoons and opossums; mysterious feathers that had floated to earth, gifts from unknown birds.
As much as Drew loves the outdoors, his grandmother helps him hear its call more deeply. Developed in a remarkable chapter of herbal remedies and ghostly visitations, Mamatha is a woman with “a foot in two dimensions—this world and the spirit one.” Her presence echoes through the pages, particularly in Lanham’s quest to infuse the teaching of science and conservation with passion: “Heart and mind cannot be exclusive of one another in the fight to save anything.”
Heart and mind are at work in the book’s structure, too. Generally chronological, the book presents itself as memoir through three mostly chronological sections—Flock, Fledgling, Flight—an innocence-to-experience arc. Each chapter, though, is a self-contained essay in the best sense of that genre: Lanham’s voice is most engaging when we get to watch his thinking, rather than depend on a narrative through-line.
While childhood wonder dances through early chapters, Lanham keeps reality close at hand: the terrible economics of keeping cows; backbreaking farm labor; and, when Drew is in high school, his father’s sudden death. The loss of his father is awful enough, but a subsequent land-grab by extended family divides The Home Place acreage, and land becomes a source of pain. While Lanham doesn’t make a connection between his personal loss and historic black dispossession from the land, he suggests one reason people of color, particularly those in the South, have low engagement in environmentalism: because land has always belonged to someone else, not to mention carried the blood of enslaved ancestors, the land carries a legacy of systemic racism rather than one of home.
For all the challenges of race and place Lanham endures, he remains a caretaker of humans as well as the wild. Family trouble runs as an undercurrent in The Home Place, but Lanham offers few specifics; there is value, he seems to say, in respecting not just nature, but people.
Lanham doesn’t hold back, however, when it comes to his own experiences and self-exploration. He relates the terror of ‘birding while black’ in the rural South, and one chapter opens with, “It’s only 9:06am and I think I might get hanged today.” I wept at the last chapter, “Patchwork Legacy,” a masterful reclamation of self, land, and purpose. To return to Finney, “our ability to imagine others is colored by the narratives, images, and meanings we’ve come to hold as truths in relation to the environment.” Thanks to J. Drew Lanham’s story, we have expanded truths and meanings, as well as a long, deep song to the natural world. In return, Lanham asks us to consider how we can begin to have a stake in anything, particularly wild land, if we don’t—or can’t—find ourselves there.