American novelist and essayist Harry Crews may be best known for his memoir A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, an affectionate and sometimes painful account of life in rural Georgia among the very poor. In this excerpt from the opening chapter of that book, Crews recounts his earliest impressions of his stepfather, who is eventually revealed to be a violent and dangerous drunk.
from A Childhood: The Biography of a Place*
by Harry Crews
I went into the long, dim, cool hallway that ran down the center of the house. Briefly I stopped at the bedroom where my parents slept and looked in at the neatly made bed and all the parts of the room, clean, with everything where it was supposed to be, just the way mama always kept it. And I thought of daddy, as I so often did because I loved him so much. If he was sitting down, I was usually in his lap. If he was standing up, I was usually holding his hand. He always said soft funny things to me and told me stories that never had an end but always continued when we met again.
He was tall and lean with flat high cheekbones and deep eyes and black thick hair which he combed straight back on his head. And under the eye on his left cheek was the scarred print of a perfect set of teeth. I knew he had taken the scar in a fight, but I never asked him about it and the teeth marks in his cheek only made him seem more powerful and stronger and special to me.
He shaved every morning at the water shelf on the back porch with a straight razor and always smelled of soap and whiskey. I knew mama did not like the whiskey, but to me it smelled sweet, better even than the soap. And I could never understand why she resisted it so, complained of it so, and kept telling him over and over again that he would kill himself and ruin everything if he continued with the whiskey. I did not understand about killing himself and I did not understand about ruining everything, but I knew the whiskey somehow caused the shouting and screaming and the ugly sound of breaking things in the night. The stronger the smell of whiskey on him, the kinder and gentler he was with me and my brother.
Works of Nonfiction by Harry Crews
- A Childhood: The Biography of a Place (memoir), Harper & Row, 1978
- Blood and Grits (essays), Harper & Row, 1979
- Florida Frenzy (essays), University Press of Florida, 1982
- 2 By Crews (essays), Lord John Press, 1984
- Madonna at Ringside (essays), Lord John Press, 1991
* A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, by Harry Crews, was published in 1978 by Harper & Row. In 1995 it was reprinted (with illustrations by Michael McCurdy) by University of Georgia Press.
