Southern Childhood

When adult Levonne Gaddy returns to the rural North Carolina community where she was born and raised to attend her mother's funeral, the director bars her entry to the viewing room, assuming she is white and therefore not related to the “colored” woman in the coffin. A sad, funny, and poignant story of childhood emerges as memories surface of racism and of the dysfunctional family life she left behind. Turmoil during the 1960s' racial integration of southern schools fill her mind, as do the challenges of her first job, at age 11, as the live-in caregiver for an elderly white woman.

She came home with nothing left to lose--except her heart. When Madeline Stewart returns to her childhood lake town with little more than a suitcase and a heavy heart, she's determined to start over. Her carefully planned life in New York has unraveled, leaving her with more questions than...

"Karen Chilton conveys both powerful joy and profound grief in her narration of Willie Mae Brown's stories about growing up in Selma, Alabama, during the Civil Rights movement."- AudioFile The preface and afterword are read by the author. Combining family stories of the everyday and the...

In Snippets of Truths, author Mary Hardy shares the stories of her youth while growing up in rural Southern Mississippi in the '50s and '60s. A collection of anecdotes and vignettes, this memoir narrates the memorable experiences of Hardy's childhood. From the large to the small, and from the ordinary and everyday to the remarkable, Snippets of Truths recalls a wide array of events living on a farm, working in the fields, attending school, participating as a majorette, becoming homecoming queen, making homemade ice cream, and creating dolls out of Coca Cola bottles.