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When Jimmy Carter ran for reelection in 1980, I was a lowly fifth-grader who wanted the chance to vote for him. By my youthful reckoning he seemed fair and earnest, and it didn't hurt that he was from Georgia, which was pretty close to my hometown in SC. And while I'm sure Democrats big and small were severely disheartened when he lost, I get some solace from his role as our nation's unofficial ambassador to poor and disenfranchised people the world over.
AN HOUR BEFORE DAYLIGHT, a memoir of his Georgia boyhood, sheds light on why a man who rose so high still travels among people our society often treats as too low for consideration. Most older Americans (you know, 30+) know that Carter grew up in the small town of Plains, Georgia, joined the Navy and became governor of his home state before becoming Commander-In-Chief. But as time passes, many Southerners are at least a generation away from the kind of farm and rural life he lived. Fewer still are around who actually count days beginning before daylight as part of their childhood. Carter's latest work, subtitled Memories of a Rural Boyhood, is most noteworthy as a record of Southern family life in the first half of the last century.
The elements that make AN HOUR BEFORE DAYLIGHT worthwhile are his tales of how land and place shaped his early life, relationships between whites and blacks across the South's racial divide, and the record of how a rural farm family produced a president and world leader.
Carter begins with a list of rivers one crosses from Savannah to Plains, originally known as Plains of Dura. It is the kind of knowledge and connection with the earth that was so necessary and ordinary in his boyhood and is rare in contemporary times. As a boy, and a man, Carter knew where to fish for what, how to cultivate the earth for food and income, and what it takes to survive in southern woodlands. (I'd take him as my guide over a "Survivor" contestant any day.) Reading his tales of farm living make it seem like a very difficult path, with few creature comforts. Yet the rewards of a close-knit, self-sufficient family and small pleasures are so much greater when there's no inundation of images of what you should want.
Carter shows how homespun pleasures like divinity candy or church-sponsored parties brought joy to his childhood. Over and over I found myself saddened at our current dependence on indoor and manufactured pursuits and pleasures. Who do you know who can name local birds and topography and bring dinner from the woods?
In Carter's boyhood pursuits he makes it clear that his closest companions were the black families on the family farm. And while he angled for his father's tutelage and approval, Jack Clark, a black man who worked for the Carters, taught the boy many of his lessons in farming. In the first pages of the memoir, his descriptions of relations between whites and blacks seem overdone, as if he's overcompensating and providing a PC version of events. The truth is that the Carters lived within and abided by segregation but did not join in being cruel to blacks. And rather than relegating descriptions of Jack Clark and others to a few pages, Carter returns to them again and again, as they were a part of his daily life throughout his boyhood. By the end of AN HOUR BEFORE DAYLIGHT it is clear that he had genuine respect and love for those black families. Carter shows how much more intimate, though patriarchal, white and black relations were during his childhood.
Jimmy Carter will always stand out because of his history and his important work even after his term as president. His efforts around the world should come as no surprise after reading AN HOUR BEFORE DAYLIGHT. He rose to the presidency not from a life of wealth and privilege, but from the simple, rural setting of a Georgia farm. And while he still travels a great deal, he has made Plains his home base --- and that speaks volumes in a time when we often disparage small towns and rural places. Carter's boyhood tales show us how a compassionate man was raised and why the family farm is a place to which he chose to return.
--- Reviewed by Bernadette Davis
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