Synopses & Reviews
In the illuminating language of memory, Deborah McDowell tells the story of her family, living a segregated life in Bessemer, Alabama, where her father worked at U.S. Foundry and Pipe, nicknamed Pipe Shop. Through the intimate details of their daily lives, she shows us how civil rights affected a working-class town, among three generations of women and men. McDowell movingly uncovers a world rarely portrayed, where she was raised to love the sounds and meanings of words and to value a place and culture that has passed. "What an eye McDowell has for important stories hidden in the everyday details, and what a good storyteller she is."--Tonya Bolden, "[McDowell] weaves the plainest drab cotton threads into a magic carpet."--Adele Logan Alexander, "Engrossing. . . . The author has a seductive way with words that makes as good as a piece of sweet potato pie served after a plate of greens and fried chicken."--
Review
"This graceful volume of memoirs, subtitled 'memories of kin,' describes the black working class neighborhood of Bessemer, Alabama in which the author was raised in the 1950"s and 60"s. McDowell renders this world in a myriad of vignettes. With a few exceptions (most notably, the slaying of the local minister, a prominent Civil Rights activist), the incidents narrated are not in themselves dramatic. The drama is created by the tension that exists between the author's vivid childhood memories and her mature knowledge of loss. For all its humor and irony, this book is profoundly elegiac. The epigram for part six, from Rilke, might serve for the volume as a whole: 'We live our lives, forever taking leave.'" Reviewed by Daniel Weiss, Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review)
Synopsis
"McDowell captures the aspirations and realities of the working-class residents of Pipe Shop, infusing them with unshakable dignity, luminous grace, and profound compassion."--Shirlee Taylor Haizlip,
About the Author
Deborah E. McDowell (Ph.D. Purdue), Co-Editor, Realism, Naturalism, Modernism. Alice Griffin Professor of English, University of Virginia. Founding editor of the Beacon Black Women Writers series; co-editor with Arnold Rampersad of Slavery of the Literary Imagination; author of "The Changing Same": Studies in Fiction by Black Women; Leaving the Pipe Shop: Memories of Kin; editor of Nella Larsen's Quicksand and Passing, Jessie Redmon Fauset's Plum Bun, Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood, and numerous articles and essays.