A memoir that brings to life the hardships and heroism of a black family in the rural South. Beginning with the Depression and concluding on the eve of great social change in the 1950s, Archer weaves together family experiences, tales and legends, history and sociology, and creates an authentic account that will appeal to readers interested in family and ethnic heritage. (Walker and Company)
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
"The black families of the Delta deserve a special place in history," writes Archer, professor at Northern Virginia Community College. With this homespun memoir of the extended Archer family, which weathered the Depression and other travails in Tchula, Mississippi, that special place is assured. Growing up in the '30s and '40s in a large, warm, self-sufficient family, the author feels that he was in a way insulated from the racial harshness of the urban South. Although he experienced segregation, endured brushes with the Ku Klux Klan and was raised among the "poorest of the poor," Archer enjoyed singular richness in family and a heritage of religious faith, ambition and attachment to a bountiful land. Part oral history, part autobiography, this reflective exploration of roots offers an intimate glimpse of how it once was for particular blacks in the rural Deep South. Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
A debut memoir that explores a little-known pocket of Americana: the experience of rural blacks in the Deep South during the Great Depression. For Archer, a professor (Student Development/Northern Virginia Community College) and newspaper columnist, childhood was composed of two worlds that tried never to meet. The inner world was the black family--and its extension, the local black community--where life was ``wrapped in a mystical haze'' of comfort and joy. In this cozy, ramshackle cosmos shone such eccentric stars as Uncle Perry, the kindly Baptist minister; Uncle Nick, an enterprising smith, potter, cook, and carpenter; and Mama Jane, an aunt who tended to judge people by the lightness of their skin. Working with the Mississippi soil, folk remedies, ingenious foods (there's a recipe here for walnut-cider rice), and the spiritual cement of the local church, blacks built a bulwark against the outer world: the ever- threatening presence of Klan lynchings, Jim Crow laws, police brutality, grinding poverty, inadequate medical care, indifferent education. Chalmers comes of age in the inner world, acquiring there the values that sustain him in adulthood; concurrently, a second education takes place, as he grows aware of the outer world, sometimes in scenes of shocking violence, and of the ways in which black self-sufficiency can chain the dogs of racism. Built of plain, poignant anecdotes, this lacks dazzle but shines with tenderness, and succeeds admirably in the author's intention ``to fill a gap in black history.'' (Twenty-five b&w photographs--not seen.) -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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