How oranges influenced the making of an award-winning journalist (Central Florida, also Gulf Coast; 1964 to 1983): What does the melancholy voice of Through the Groves tell us about the childhood and coming-of-age underpinnings that influenced the making of a celebrated journalist?

Anne Hull’s memoir of memories goes as far back to when she was three years old, to her early twenties. What do the events she recalls tell us about Hull?

An absorbing question knowing she’s the recipient of prestigious journalism awards that recognize Courage in Journalism (Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award), and the advancement of Human Rights (RFK Journalism Grand Prize Award).

Aware of these distinctions, you may find yourself looking for the emergence of skills and characteristics you imagine an acclaimed journalist might possess. That’s what makes reading this memoir different than others who also grew up impoverished, in an unstable home, in an oppressive place – in Hull’s case, undeveloped, “desolate” Central Florida in the 60s before Disney broke ground. Her father, son of citrus-growers, once told his six-year-old daughter that where they lived “was no place for a child, though Disney was betting otherwise.”

That town was Sebring, an area below “four thousand square miles of rural lands and unmarked roads” referred to as the Ridge. Back then, having the “heaviest concentration of citrus groves in the world.” Lurking under canopies of beautiful oak trees with “mossy beards” was a world not fit for a child. So why isolate and coop up a young girl in the blazing, humid summers inside a truck without air-conditioning and a windshield coated with “pesticide dust”? Why did her mother Victoria insist she accompany him? Driving through, checking on the orange groves he was in charge of for HP Hood milk company’s citrus subsidiary, now gone. “Almost nothing in Florida stays the same way,” Hull reflects, capturing some things that haven’t changed. 

Her early memories etch a sense of outsiderhood: formidable “aloneness” and injustice a young girl perceptively picked up on and figured out. One involved her father’s right-hand man who supervised a hard-laboring crew of fruit pickers, Booker Sanders. Yes, his name evokes Bernie Sanders, senior Senator from Vermont, who’d have fought for Booker for Mayor of Sebring since he was by far the more qualified candidate but not happening in this white man’s world. Racism is alive and well, rearing its ugly head in another episode of a black man served at a lunch counter after segregation ended yet still treated like a dog. Is it any wonder, then, that Hull grew up to report on stories of racism, isolation, poverty over the twenty years she worked for The Washington Post?

The memoir makes you think of other people too. Like the often-quoted, Pulitzer Prize winning poet Mary Oliver, who penned, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do/with your one wild and precious life?” Hull’s childhood was wild in the emotionally unsettling, uprooted sense, and geographically playing in “spooky” cypress swamps teaming with alligators, mosquitoes, and chemicals. Her father sold pesticides for ORTHO, the chemical company. Can you hear Rachel Carson screaming? Once he was promoted to managing orange groves, the climate determined his family’s livelihood. Drought and cold weather became significant factors in his emotional distress and alcoholism.

Hull couldn’t have answered Oliver’s poetic question during the years she looks back on. Instead, she chooses issues she grew up in, around, and observed. Including culture wars between two parents whose values, aims, and worldliness were polar opposites, and a culture’s deep-seated religious faith and conservatism that didn’t allow her to freely express herself. A bright spot, more like a spotlight, was her maternal grandmother, Olive or Damie. A bohemian, “an ethereal flower,” she relocated to St. Petersburg from Brooklyn when she became widowed. Her Gulf Coast home was cluttered with “tribal masks, hookah pipes, Chinese scrolls, Bombay wicker fans” that drove her mother crazy when they lived with her, but the guitar-playing, Beatles and Carly Simon fan Damie let Hull be who she wanted to be.

On September 27, 2004, Hull wrote an article for the Post titled “A Slow Journey from Isolation,” in which she speaks of her “coming out” as a journey. Hull chose to play with toy soldiers over dolls. Again, keenly aware early on, seeing herself as a “tomboy” preferring to play with boys, fishing in the plentiful lakes, running around in pants not dresses. Her mother and paternal grandmother Gigi did what they could to direct her to more feminine things. Not that the two saw eye- to-eye all the time, with Gigi a member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. She lived in a town called Hopewell. An ironic name for a place that felt hopeless.

In fourth grade, Hull did find two kindred girlfriends. She recognized the threesome as outcasts. One a black girl, the other a girl who liked and treated her black classmate swell. Housed in a brand-new school named Stonewall Jackson Elementary, governed by a school board that fought against integration for eight years, how did this affect Hull’s sensitivities?

The budding journalist, though, stays balanced, showing a generous side of Gigi and, more profoundly, her father despite being estranged for a long time. He’s seen as a tragic figure who just couldn’t overcome. We empathize with him and his down-and-out plight. When MLK was assassinated he told Booker, “It’s gonna hurt whites, too, the loss of Dr. King.” He understood his friend’s pain and what trying to kill the Dream meant for all of us.

Through the Groves is a memoir needing to overcome.

There’s nostalgia in some of what Hull recollects, but mostly we feel emotional pain. The first hint, the sleepwalking incident at three when she managed to walk out the front door unnoticed, made it across the lawn and street. Sleepwalking reflects some type of stress, as did Hull’s bedwetting bouts each time her mother moved her and her much easier-going younger brother Dwight someplace else.

Hull saw her mother’s restlessness. Her father never stepped foot out of Florida, whereas her mother grew up in Prospect Park, a borough of New York City. Raised around luxuries, her father around “God and oranges.”

Hull’s mother wasn’t around a lot, especially when she became an elementary school teacher, with higher ambitions, as a single-mother. Interestingly, Hull didn’t think of her that way, blessed with two substitute mothers: Damie and Ceola, a $5 a day caregiver/housekeeper/playmate. She lived on the wrong side of the tracks in what was called Black Sebring, or Colored Town, or other degrading names. Her world “felt like a separate town.” Separate and not equal.

Despite the emotional chaos of Hull’s formative years, she displays the kind of emotional restraint you’d expect of a seasoned journalist. This isn’t a poor-me examination of her early years described in sappy or angry prose. The three times she uses the word “sobbed” and once writes about tears speaks volumes. Less becomes more in this slim yet poignant memoir.

What we see is a journalist’s powers of observation, clarity of prose, ability to tell stirring accounts but not by overdramatizing them. Hull’s voice feels authentic, truthful, and from someone not seeking the limelight. 

What we don’t see is how she picked up the pieces to become an acclaimed journalist. We’re left waiting for a second memoir that tells us how she became who she is.

Lorraine