by Howard Dwight Branch (Author)

The author captured life for he and his siblings in a light-hearted way as they grew up as a large African American family in rural Mississippi during the mid-nineteen-hundreds. They are children of a sharecropper. The book chronicles their life on the farm by exploring births, work, housing, food, clothing, school, church, idioms, and other aspects of their life. Life was hard and made harder in part due to the systemic inequities of the time. However, they did not dwell on their circumstances but rather their aspirations. Their story is presumed to be representative of their community's story. Though our family serve as the basis for the content, we believe it to be reasonably representative of other, especially African American, families of similar socioeconomic backgrounds within our geographical region and likely far beyond. The book loosely depicts the time period from when the eldest sibling/sister would have turned six years old to when the youngest would have completed high school. I believe that most of us have some clear memories of things once we started school. If the math is correct this period equates to the 35 years between 1947 and 1982. In all likelihood, we have, not-so-distant, blood relatives scattered throughout the United States and in distant lands.