“You couldn’t just grow up. You had to make a series of time-appropriate concessions,” Anne Hull recalls about her childhood in her memoir, Through the Groves. “Everything was a rite of passage. They showered you with soft white leather Bibles and antique dolls and bookends shaped like praying hands.” Hull ruefully concludes: “All I wanted was an air gun.” A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, her writing is both leisurely and biting as she examines the bright days and dark corners of her childhood.
Hull was born into “the round world of oranges” in central Florida, where “the blossoms heaved and sighed for three weeks straight.” Her memoir begins with the long drives through the orange groves where her father worked in back-breaking and soul-crushing conditions. Her family was loving and outwardly content, but her father’s alcoholism was a toxic mold seeping in through the windows, and the advent of seedless oranges and Walt Disney changed Hull’s community forever.
Her glamorous mother was a Brooklyn native and “liberal Yankee” who loved Omar Sharif, Joyce Chen, “To Sir, With Love” and “Fiddler on the Roof.” To their neighbors, her appreciation of multiculturalism seemed as out of place in central Florida as a blizzard. Despite her selective nonconformity, she was still a product of her time and tried to coax her daughter into demure Southern ladyhood — “she was talking about the seasons of life and the wonderfulness of girlhood, none of which she sounded a hundred percent sold on herself.” Adherence to gender expectations was a method of survival for a woman in the South during Hull’s youth.
Loyalty to tradition was the norm as Hull grew up in central Florida and change was stubbornly resisted, so as Hull approached adulthood, she increasingly butted heads with those around her. Her writing is best when describing the desperate, rotting beauty of her surroundings and her eccentric family members. “For the Hulls, God and oranges were the cornerstone of life… They sat on sticky sap benches for hours so a preacher could yell at them on their one day off.” She describes her grandmother, Gigi, as someone who “spoke in a breathy Southern drawl, with the airflow squeezing up through too-small windpipes and forced out with charm. It sounded like she’d been socked in the breadbasket with the butt of a Yankee rifle.”
Most of the men in her extended family left or died, and young Hull loved the powdered, perfumed female relatives who remained with an intricate, highly observant love. She was an outsider from an early age, and ran around shirtless with the neighborhood boys and collected spy paraphernalia in defiance of Southern girlhood norms. Mentally, emotionally, and physically isolated, she soon realized that there are things about herself that she might not ever be able to tell her parents. As she reached adulthood, she realized that the home she loved might not always be a safe place due to its disapproval of unconventional women. When Hull realized her sexual identity would forever separate her from the confined and humid world she was born into, she clawed her way up north to intellectual and personal freedom. After leaving Florida and getting to Harvard, she describes the new world she encountered as “a casino for the mind with coins that poured down nonstop.”
Evocative and haunting, Through the Groves is reminiscent of Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit what with its handling of a precocious child who discovers a sexual identity at odds with her matriarchal yet still repressed family. Both books have oranges, but Hull’s story is thoroughly Southern and utterly unique. You will return to it again, just as the Canada geese continue to fly south for the winter and the Yankees return to Disney World.
Through the Groves
By Anne Hull
Henry Holt and Company
Published June 20, 2023
Southern Review of Books 