Two central Alabama counties, Hale and Tuscaloosa, provide the setting for this absorbing story of a young boy struggling, during the forties and fifties, to define himself in a world of poverty and deprivation. Son of a forceful mother Lucille, who was greatly ambitious for her children, and a feckless father Albert, who never knew how to capitalize on his advantages, Norman McMillan was the eighth of ten children. During much of his first nine years, his family sharecropped, living in a series of rough, unpainted houses near Greensboro. For the next nine, they lived in a better house on a farm in southern Tuscaloosa County, but they continued to struggle, clawing out a meager living by truck farming.
Both comical and moving, DISTANT SON tells the story of these parents and their children as well as their relatives and neighbors. It depicts with rich and lively detail a life that was largely fading in the boom years of the forties and fifties, but a world in which many people still found themselves. Without self-pity, the memoir celebrates the human spirit and its triumphant power to transcend temporary circumstances.
