Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

"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.

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

In his poem "Bearded Oaks," Robert Penn Warren wrote, "We live in time so little time/ And we learn all so painfully,/ That we may spare this hour's term/ To practice for eternity." Warren's work is largely an effort to capture the eternity of the moment, to find the universal in a concrete experience, an effort that is taken up by Cauthen. She sees, perhaps better than Warren, though, that we are spatial as well as temporal beings and that the meanings of our lives are embedded in the depth of time and spread through the places we have inhabited.

While Southern Comforts is probably best described as organic memoir, Cauthen effortlessly melds genres to show how the lives of occupants of a particular place intertwine like matted roots. In an imagistic, poetic style, she proves that there's no such thing as an ordinary life, that no one really lives independently, and that sifted through the hands of a gifted writer all soils become fertile.

Wherever you are from, this book will make you feel that you have practiced for eternity in this Florida place.

One of the most compelling human needs can be summed up in four words: Tell me a story. Sudye Cauthen is a storyteller; from the first paragraph of the preface, I was hooked on Southern Comforts.

Cauthen writes, "This work emerged from a struggle to see my home community and myself in perspective . . . Who I am is intrinsically entwined with place." Her place is Alachua, a small, rural community in northern Florida. A fifth generation Floridian, Cauthen is a writer, poet, folklorist and oral historian who has made a decades-long study of Alachua. She has preserved on tape the voices and stories of generations now gone or almost gone, as the community and the world around it changed. Those voices are added to Cauthen's own in her narrative.

Cauthen has been part of the change, but she has also been the watcher, the seeker, the chronicler of the community's fitful struggle to adapt to a new reality. Her strength of feeling for place, her simple and graceful prose, and her understanding of the ties between rural people and their land bring to mind Wendell Berry. But her voice is all her own - wry and insightful, with a restrained passion for the place that defines her. She has an acute eye for the telling detail. And like good poetry, her work carries a weight that is more than the sum of its parts.

To read Cauthen's words - like hearing the wind in longleaf pines, the calls of sandhill cranes, or the songs of Will McLean - is to be touched by the real Florida. Southern Comforts is at once a rewarding memoir, an astute social history and an evocation of a unique place that is disappearing. Don't miss this book. Really.