The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature

By J. Drew Lanham

In me, there is the red of miry clay, the brown of spring floods, the gold of ripening tobacco. All of these hues are me; I am, in the deepest sense, colored.” From these fertile soils of love, land, identity, family, and race emerges The Home Place, a big-hearted, unforgettable memoir by ornithologist and professor of ecology J. Drew Lanham.

Dating back to slavery, Edgefield County, South Carolinaa 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.”

By turns angry, funny, elegiac, and heartbreaking, The Home Place 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 Southand in America today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Release date: Aug 22, 2016
• ISBN: 9781571318756

J. Drew Lanham

J. Drew Lanham is the author of Sparrow Envy: Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts and The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature. He has received a MacArthur "Genius" Grant as well as the Dan W. Lufkin Conservation Award (National Audubon Society), the Rosa Parks and Grace Lee Boggs Outstanding Service Award (North American Association for Environmental Education), and the E. O. Wilson Award for Outstanding Science in Biodiversity Conservation (Center for Biological Diversity). He served as the Poet Laureate of Edgefield, South Carolina in 2022. He is a bird watcher, poet, and Distinguished Professor of Wildlife Ecology and Master Teacher at Clemson University. He lives in Seneca, South Carolina. 

Reviews for The Home Place

[aapremlall · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I loved hearing Drew read his own poetic words on the Audiobook. It was simply divine and added much more to the words on the page. Poetry needs to be read out loud and he blessed us with this treasure.

I felt like sitting with him by a campfire and listening to the stories of his upbringing and the humorous, racist, and spiritual experiences that influenced the extraordinary human being that he is today.

What Drew adds to the world of nature writing is the intimate knowledge of what being a Black man is like in open spaces that should belong to all, but are often not, and rarely told in pieces by others who cannot fathom or even empathize with this heartbreaking isolation.

I feel like I know him on a deeper level and that I am not alone with the struggles I encounter as a colored woman in the environmental/agricultural world. I'm definitely looking forward to his next (audio) books.

[bodagirl · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

With a lyric yet plain spoken style, Lanham's memoir is a poignant tribute to nature complicated by a society's attempt to stereotype a black biologist.

[viviennestrauss · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I really enjoyed this book read by the author and look forward to reading more of his work.

[bookwren · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Honest, lyrical, and filled with the author's philosophy, learned from E. O. Wilson, "to notice, nurture, and care" for the land and all her beings.

[msf59 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

“I am a man in love with nature. I am an eco-addict, consuming everything that the outdoors offers its all-you-can-sense, seasonal buffet. I am a wildling, born of forests and fields and more comfortable on unpaved back roads and winding woodland paths than in any place where concrete, asphalt, and crowds prevail.” “Being a birder in the United States means that you're probably a middle-aged, middle-class, well-educated white man. While most of the labels apply to me, I am a black man and there fore a birding anomaly. The chances of seeing someone who looks like me while on the trail are only slightly greater than those of sighting an ivory-billed woodpecker.”“I've expanded the walls of my spiritual existence beyond the pews and pulpit to include longleaf savannas, salt marshes, cove forests, and tall-grass prairie. The miracles for me are in migratory journeys and moonlit nights. Swan song is sacred. Nature seems worthy of worship.”I had not heard of Professor Lanham before reading this solid memoir, which is a bit surprising since I am a fellow birder, nature-lover and avid reader. Regardless, I enjoyed following his history, growing up in rural southwestern South Carolina. His family were farmers and this where he learned to love the outdoors and respect hard work. He also witnessed the racism that ravaged the south in the 1960s and this also shaped the man he became. He also turned out to be an accomplished writer and poet. My only quibble was, I would have liked more of his birding life. I felt short-changed.