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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Couldn't put this down!, April 22, 2009
This review is from: In the Land of Cotton (Paperback)
hroughout history classes during my school, I was told of slavery, and the contempt that remained towards African-Americans in the south long after slavery was abolished. I was told of segregation, and cruelty, and violence and murder. All of this struck a chord with me as wrong, but the books we were given to read were never instrumental in evoking the rage and sadness these events merited. The acts themselves, and the paragraphs they elicited in our history books sufficed in that regard. Then I read Martha Taylor's In the Land of Cotton. I couldn't put this book down for a second. I read it from start to finish with very little interruption. The book reads as a novel, and so is thoroughly captivating in that regard, but then I realized that it's not fiction at all. It's Ms. Taylor's life story growing up during the Civil Rights Movement.
The book begins in 1956 with a young Martha telling of her life in Tennessee, where she lives with her affluent grandparents while her parents and younger sister reside in Arkansas. Her parents move to Tennessee and she moves back in with them into a suburb with identical housing, much different than the world she inhabits with her grandparents. One thing they both have in common, however, is their disdain for and distrust of the African-American neighbors. As you'll find within the first few chapters, that distrust and disdain should have been held for someone far closer to home.
Martha's father has always had trouble holding down a job, but after finding a job he hires Lucy to be a caretaker for Martha and her sister, while he and his wife are at work. Lucy quickly becomes a confidante to Martha, and Martha doesn't see her as the maid or the nanny but as a friend, and later as part of her family. Martha and Jimmy, a friend in the neighborhood, like to explore as a means to escape their home lives, and one day Martha finds a road and eventually convinces Jimmy to explore with her. It isn't long before Martha is going alone, and she finds the road leads to Lucy's home and family.
Although hesitant at first to let Martha stay and visit for obvious reasons, eventually she's welcomed with open arms by Lucy, Lucy's mother,Mammy Grace, and the patriarch of the family, Uncle Jesse. One person she develops a close kinship with immediately is Lucy's nephew Silas. Martha being there isn't always smooth sailing as told in one heartbreaking incident. Eventually, the friendship between Silas and Martha develops into more, much to the the dismay of all involved, including Silas who knows he has no place in Martha's world during the height of the Civil Rights movement, in the south no less. Martha's family moves to Texas, and reeling from the amount of loss in his life, Silas moves to Chicago. They keep in touch mainly through Martha's weekly calls to Lucy, but eventually find their way back into the other's life. After all, they've never left each other's hearts.
The goings-on of the era are highlighted extensively throughout the telling of her story, from Kennedy to Martin Luther King to Vietnam, space expeditions and Malcolm X. Before I realized this wasn't fiction, I silently applauded Ms. Taylor's research. But it wasn't research, it was something she lived through. And I think that is the key difference between this and so many other books I've read that take place in this era. Ms. Taylor opens the curtains to show us not just the world as it was then, but her world as it was then. Taking place over the course of twelve years, it's both eye opening and incredibly heart breaking. I cannot recommend picking up this book enough.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A top pick for those seeking historical fiction focusing on the emergence of civil rights, July 8, 2009
This review is from: In the Land of Cotton (Paperback)
It's strange that another world could have been so close by. "In the Land of Cotton" is a fictional exploration of racial relations in the 50s, using a young unassuming white girl by the name of the Martha as the protagonist of the story. She finds a black family living in the woods, and discovers a whole different world as she learns to understand and despise the racial divide that was so prevalent in America during the time. "In the Land of Cotton" is a top pick for those seeking historical fiction focusing on the emergence of civil rights.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Love in the Land of Cotton, June 10, 2009
This review is from: In the Land of Cotton (Paperback)
This book is a gripping story of a girl growing up in the deep South in the 50's and 60's. Martha A. Taylor has a story to tell, and she tells it with a fierce determination and enormous compassion.
I've read a lot about the Civil Rights Movement, and was shocked that even after the Civil War blacks were denigrated to a different tier of society than whites were. But they were, and I didn't know why. I remember madly loving Miz Williams, who worked as a housekeeper for our family for an all-too-brief period of time. Her name was Virginia, same as mine was then, and she'd tell us about her family. She kept the house clean, made great chocolate chip cookies, and stood up with my sister against her oppressors (frequently me and my brother, as we carried the teasing a little too far at time). I couldn't understand why she lived in the projects. I couldn't understand why anyone did, frankly, as they scared me. I thought the people who lived there did so because they were criminals, selling drugs, robbing people, etc. But if Miz Williams lived there, that couldn't be right. So she must have lived there because that was the only place she and her family could afford and where they were welcomed by their neighbours.
Martha has her own version of Miz Williams in the person of Lucy. Lucy takes Martha right into her heart, and loves her hard, loves her truly, consoling her when her parents go out of town and the creepy pedophiliac is left to babysit. But then the unthinkable happens--Martha's father loses his job, and the decision is made to let Lucy go since he will be home during the day.
Martha, heartbroken, gets up the courage to go see Lucy at her house. What she finds when she gets there, and the friendships and bonds she make last with her forever. The love that builds between Martha and Lucy's nephew Silas begins to grow and blossom against an increasingly turbulent world--sit-in's at lunch counters, riots in major U.S. cities, the Korean War, the Vietnam Conflict. Silas ends up in the military, and gets sent to a hospital in Germany with life-threatening injuries. Martha defies her family (who do not yet know that Silas is black), and sneaks awway to Germany to see him. She is saddened to learn that, despite the injuries, he will be sent back into conflict, but gains the courage to tell her mother that the Silas with whom she is so deeply in love is black.
Her mother is shocked--an interracial marriage was a thing not to be thought of! And she was right. I remember the first time I saw an interracial marriage, and even as liberal minded and nonprejudiced as I thought myself to be, it shocked me. But that was when I was a child in Georgia in the 60's & 70's, a generation or two behind Martha's.
Martha herself tells you that it took her a long time to understand how deep the roots of prejudice go, to understand that Lucy and Silas and their wild wonderful family were not extraordinary blacks. They were extraordinary people because of themselves, not because of their race nor despite it.
I can't recommend this book highly enough. It's fascinating and heartbreaking and eye-opening and every good thing. Go. Read it. You know you want to.
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