Growing Up White In Brassfield A Memoir

Growing Up White in Brassfield 1946: Every room in the funeral home was full. I guess Daddy knew about everybody in the county and the town. The grown men carried on something awful, laughing and talking about tobacco stripping and hog prices. Didn't they know my Daddy was dead? I always appreciated the fact that there was one entire room full of "colored people" at daddy's funeral. The entire community must have come out. Of course this was long before integration. They had no choice to where they sat. Seeing the whole collective bunch of neighbors there together made a great impact on my heart

This little book was written in 2004 when Sally was seventy years old. Words just poured out. John liked it and pressured her to have it printed. A few years later she became interested in writing poetry, got sidetracked into play writing and participated in dramatic reading at Waysmeet, Berea College Square. In 2007 Sally was accepted to go for a week to Hindman, Kentucky to the 30th annual Appalachian Writers Workshop. She worked with Joyce Dyer, director of the Lindsay-Crane Center for writing at Hiram College in Ohio. Sally and her childhood sweetheart John Samuel Congleton have been married fifty-nine years in 2011. John encouraged her to have this revised memoir printed. She graduated from Eastern Kentucky University in 1983 with a Bachelor of Arts Degree with high distinction. At that time she was forty-nine years old. Sally worked as a paralegal and bookkeeper in Richmond and Berea for many years. Sally and John each have a story published in the anthology, Appalachian Angels, (2008). A selection of her poetry was read by the New Mummers Production group from New York City as part of an Urban/Cultural exchange with Berea, Kentucky