You May Plow Here: The Narrative of Sara Brooks - Softcover

Sara Brooks

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393308669 ISBN 13: 9780393308662

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 1990

Synopsis

“A wonderful book―funny, sad, packed with action and information about life in black Alabama in the decades before World War II. . . . A welcome addition to the growing of books by and about black women.” ―Dorothy Sterling, author of We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century

The daughter of a freeholder, Sara Brooks was born in 1911 on her parents’ subsistence farm in west Alabama. Here in her own words, she makes us understand what it felt like to be young, black, innocent, and steeped in the ways of a black rural world that has largely been lost to us.

About this title

About the Author:

Sara Brooks was the daughter of a freeholder born in 1911 on her parents’ subsistence farm in west Alabama.

Thordis Simonsen is a writer, visual artist, and speaker who lives in Denver, Colorado, and Elika, Greece.

Robert Coles is a child psychiatrist and writer who has spent his life doing documentary work. He lives in Concord, Massachusetts.

From Library Journal:

This oral history is the narrative of a black domestic worker, recorded and edited by the son of her white employers. Sara, clearly a glad-hearted woman with an excellent memory, reminisces about a farm childhood in Alabama and the events leading to her 30 years of domestic service in Cleveland. Her family, poor but respectable, was part of a rural black society that had little direct contact with whites. Life was made up of hard work on the land, church meetings, and childhood escapades. Sara's memory for detail yields valuable historical material: how corn, cotton, and potatoes were planted; which plants made up home remedies; what children recited at school or sang at play. Though interest is not consistently sustained, Sara's voice comes through, resonant with a lifetime's experience. Laurie Spector Sullivan, Regis Coll. Archives, Weston, Mass.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0393308669
• ISBN 13: 9780393308662
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224
• Editor: Thordis Simonsen