Title: The home place : memoirs of a colored man's love affair with nature /
Authors: Lanham, J. Drew
Year: 2016
Subjects: Lanham, J. Drew; Zoologists South Carolina Biography.; African American zoologists South Carolina Biography.; Conservationists South Carolina Biography.; African American conservationists South Carolina Biography.
Abstract: "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"-to find joy and freedom in the same land his ancestors were tied to by forced labor, and then to be a black man in a profoundly white field. This book 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."--Jacket.
Contents: Me : an introduction -- FLOCK -- The home place -- Mamatha takes flight -- A good name -- A field guide to the four -- First-Sunday God -- FLEDGLING -- Little brown Icarus -- Whose eye is on the sparrow -- Cows -- Life's spring -- FLIGHT -- The bluebird of enlightenment -- Hoops -- Birding while black -- Jawbone -- New religion -- Thinking -- Digging -- Family reunion -- Patchwork legacy.