Coming Up Down Home: A Memoir of a Southern Childhood (Dark Tower Series) - Hardcover

Brown, Cecil

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0880012935 ISBN 13: 9780880012935

Publisher: Ecco Pr, 1993

Synopsis

In this engrossing memoir, novelist Cecil Brown, author of the highly acclaimed The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger, has written a lively and poignant account of his childhood in the small farming village of Bolton, North Carolina.
Raised by a loving aunt and uncle, Brown evokes a lost world of rural southern America in the late forties and early fifties as he mischievously romps with his brother Cornelius through the cotton fields, churches, and houses of the tiny community populated by such vivid characters as Uncle Sugarboy, Geechie Collins, June Bug, Juicy Belle, and Miss Commie.
But beyond the seeming small-town innocence and the insular bonds of his extended family, a growing awareness of prejudice and institutional racism leads young Cecil to a painful confrontation with his father's tragic past and his desire for Cecil to stay home on the farm. Finding respite and encouragement first in the simple illusions of magic, which provide valuable insights into surviving in the white man's world, then in jazz, in which a saxophone becomes a ticket to New York City, and, finally, in higher education, he struggles to break free of his family's violent history and from the land that was for so long their salvation.
Reminiscent of Richard Wright's Black Boy and Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Coming Up Down Home is an evocative personal odyssey that mirrors this country's larger struggle with racism and violence that culminated in the marches and boycotts of the early 1960s. Steeped in the rich traditions, vivid folklore, and brutal history of rural African-Americans, it documents the coming of age of a young man as he sorts through dignity to arrive at a deeper understanding of the black identity in America.

About this title

About the Author

Cecil Brown is currently a professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

Reviews

This evocative portrait of a Southern black family in the 1940s and 1950s is a work of classic proportions. It relates the joys and sorrows of two abandoned children--their father in prison and, relatives say, their "high yaller" mother too young and pretty to be tied down to a two-year-old and an infant. Luckily, they are looked after by wise and kind Uncle Lofton and Aunt Amanda, who live in the rural village of Bolton, N.C. Uncle Lofton has a job working on the railroad tracks, which the children admire, and Aunt Amanda sometimes lets them help her pick cotton. They grow up poor but loved. When their parents suddenly reappear after 10 years, Brown ( Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger ) and his brother Knee are cruelly wrenched from the aunt and uncle whom they regard as their real mother and father. At 13, Brown's adjustment is difficult; he fears his brutal father; his mother is no substitute for Aunt Amanda. He escapes by winning a scholarship to a local college and later he fulfills his dream of going North. Universal in many of the elements of a childhood recollected, this is a work of singular detail, and in Brown's greatly talented hands, it is totally engrossing.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Brown's fiction (The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger, 1970; Days Without Weather, 1982) has starred uprooted black men in Copenhagen and southern California. Here, in a memoir of his own roots in North Carolina, the author employs a simple storytelling style in which, from the child's naive perspective, some formative events appear quite poignant. Young ``Morris'' (Brown's name for himself) is born during WW II and, with his brother, is raised by Aunt Amanda and Uncle Lofton because the boys' real father, Cuffy, is living in a ``house in the mountains''--actually, a Virginia prison--and their real mother can't be tied down. Amanda is the black rural version of 1950's motherly perfection: cooking, cleaning, washing, baking the best pies, and always in loving good humor--although a typical day for her also includes picking cotton all day for cash, coming home to sort tobacco leaves, and cooking at the white folks' club at night after feeding her own family. Railroad worker Lofton encourages the boys to do well in school and provides a role model, but Morris sometimes wants to be a bad man like his father, whom he imagines is as legendary as the Stagolee of song fame. When Cuffy's finally released from prison, he claims his sons and imposes a life of discipline, farming, no future, and no books--though Morris does enjoy plowing with the mule, and Cuffy will come through in a surprising way for his son before the story ends. A sometimes familiar odyssey--down south, there are railroads, racism, and revivals, while during a New York summer, Morris learns more about jazz, junkies, and white women--but particularized and engaging in the telling. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

For blacks, growing up in North Carolina during the 1950s meant visits from the Klu Klux Klan, Whites Only signs, and a life of poverty and backbreaking work. In this memoir, Brown tells of his struggles to escape the violence plaguing his family and the low expectations for people of color. His rebellion culminates in his defiance of his father to seek summer work in New York City; he then wins a scholarship to college despite his principal's declaring that he isn't college material. Brown, the author of The Life and Loves of Mr. Jive Ass Nigger (Ecco Pr., 1991), among other books, tells his story with all the poignancy and sensitivity it deserves, never giving way to sentimentality despite the accumulated pain that lies just below the surface. An inspirational book that offers hope to all who seek to overcome discrimination. -- Nancy R. Ives, SUNY at Geneseo
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Ecco Pr
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0880012935
• ISBN 13: 9780880012935
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 222