Southern Comforts: Rooted in a Florida Place (Center for American Places) (Center Books on the American South) [Hardcover]

Sudye Cauthen (Author)

Book Description

Series: Center Books on the American South | Publication Date: November 15, 2007

"The Florida I love is perishing," says Sudye Cauthen. In Southern Comforts, this fifth-generation Floridian blends memoir, oral history, and cultural geography to explore the tensions between community and environment in America today and her own ambivalence about Alachua, the place just north of Gainesville where she was born and reared. Cauthen raises a cry for all that is lost as Florida's--and America's--landscapes and traditions are replaced by interstates, condos, shopping malls, and the new way of life they represent.

Part self-reflection, part meditation, and part social analysis, Cauthen's work threads through the stories of blacks, whites, and Native Americans--men and women--including her own family members. Through their words and hers, Cauthen explores northern Florida's unique history, culture, and geography while she seeks a greater understanding of herself and her surroundings.

Cauthen's journey takes readers down dirt roads and city streets, to her people's tobacco fields and churches. She sifts sand at an archaeological dig for the lost Spanish mission of Santa Fe de Toloca, peers into an aboriginal grave, and everywhere marshals evidence for the primacy of place in determining who we are. One story takes us on a fox hunt; another reveals lingering racial problems. Permeating the book is the ever-present menace of growth and development and what it holds for Cauthen's Florida.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

After her divorce and her father's death, Cauthen returns to Alachua, a small town north of Gainesville, Florida, home to five generations of her family. She feels as if she's "watching a relative die, bit by bit" as land is relentlessly "buried under asphalt, concrete, and steel." In chapters devoted to different family members—such as her dad's younger brother, who ran a barber shop in Alachua for 30 years—Cauthen traces the history of the region back to the late 1540s, weaving family memories with the oral histories of longtime residents, including workers in the surrounding tobacco fields whose slave ancestors worked those same fields more than 150 years ago. Each site she visits brings more pain, as she discovers her aunt's swimming hole polluted with fertilizer chemicals and her beloved countryside "sliced by realtors into pieces." Cauthen writes eloquently about the loss of the place where she was raised, and which she so obviously loves. At least her cautionary memoir succeeds, on paper, in preserving what once was. Donovan, Deborah

Review

"[A]t once a memoir of childhood, the story of a hometown, and something more than either of these things.... It is not only Cauthen's skill as a writer, but also her exhaustive research, that makes her narrative compelling. She...draws on numerous recorded interviews with some of Alachua County's oldest residents to make her picture of the place and its history.... Pieces of the region's more general history...are handed out in lively style, and in chunks small enough to remain interesting even to non-history buffs." --Jasmine Rizer, Moonshine: A Journal of the Arts

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press (November 15, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1930066589
• ISBN-13: 978-1930066588
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.9 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,799,702 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Hello, Reader,

I don't know all of you, but I have heard from individuals as far away as Paris. I am in Florida, my home state, but when I first became aware of your presence in my life, I was in Mississippi where I had settled in to finish this book that haunted me day and night for five years.

As I struggled through many starts to write the book's second section about the town of Alachua in North Florida, I came to believe in you. I had finished the countryside section and that was a very different experience. Although throughout the book I deliberately made myself a human screen through which many emotions fell, writing about the town somehow terrified me. I started and stopped, started and stopped again.

One evening, as i struggled to find a way into the town part of the book, I was crying. I asked myself why I should go on, who would care. And then I felt that someone was waiting for a few of these words and wanted to share the understanding I was struggling toward. That was you, dear reader. Thank you for being there.

In the movie of his life, C. S. Lewis is played by A. Perkins who says "I read to know I am not alone." I understand that and now that Southern Comforts: Rooted in a Florida Place is in your hands, I can tell you: I write to know I am not alone.

Thanks more than you could ever guess,

Sudye Cauthen

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Blends memoir, oral history and cultural geography to consider the vanishing elements of a place she holds dear., March 2, 2008

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Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Southern Comforts: Rooted in a Florida Place (Center for American Places) (Center Books on the American South) (Hardcover)

Sudye Cauthen is a fifth-generation Floridian who blends memoir, oral history and cultural geography to consider the vanishing elements of a place she holds dear. Southern Comforts: Rooted in a Florida Place is a recommended pick for any library strong on Florida history and culture, surveying the roots of changes to tradition and sense of place and considering archeology as well as history in the process.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Southern Comforts, March 16, 2008

By 

William C. Cliett, Jr. "Wakean" (Gainesville, FL) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Southern Comforts: Rooted in a Florida Place (Center for American Places) (Center Books on the American South) (Hardcover)

"Southern Comforts" is an evocative prose poem of a place - Alachua, Florida - its countryside and town - its people, Native Americans, black, white, young, old, family, friends, living, and dead - and their stories, fact and fable, that coalese and collect in one woman's search for herself. The author is a rare species, a fifth-generation Floridian whose ancestors came to Alachua in horse-drawn wagons in a state ever increasingly populated with transplants.

"Tell me the landscape in which you live," Cauthen quotes Jose Ortega y Gasset, "and I will tell you who you are." Through her exploration of all aspects of her landscape comes, if not peace, self-knowledge and the comforts of understanding, a portal to the present through memories of things past. "Southern Comforts" points a way to those of us who seek why we are who and where we are and how we may find our way and place in today and tomorrow.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars southern comforts rooted in a florida place, April 5, 2008

By 

E. Wilkerson (Westville, FL) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Southern Comforts: Rooted in a Florida Place (Center for American Places) (Center Books on the American South) (Hardcover)

Beautifully written, beautifully bound - I purchased six copies and gave five to friends, all of whom love this book.