Growing Up Black in Rural Mississippi: Memories of a Family, Heritage of a Place - Hardcover

Archer, Chalmers

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0802711758 ISBN 13: 9780802711755

Publisher: Walker & Co, 1992

Synopsis

A true account of one African-American family weaves family legend, history, and sociology to describe the family's farm, community, and relationships

About this title

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.

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Walker & Co
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0802711758
• ISBN 13: 9780802711755
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 156