cover image Growing Up Black in Rural Mississippi: Memories of a Family, Heritage of a Place

Growing Up Black in Rural Mississippi: Memories of a Family, Heritage of a Place

Chalmers Archer. Walker & Company, $19.95 (156pp) ISBN 978-0-8027-1175-5

``The black families of the Delta deserve a special place in history,'' writes Archer, professor at Northern Virginia Community College. With this homespun memoir of the extended Archer family, which weathered the Depression and other travails in Tchula, Mississippi, that special place is assured. Growing up in the '30s and '40s in a large, warm, self-sufficient family, the author feels that he was in a way insulated from the racial harshness of the urban South. Although he experienced segregation, endured brushes with the Ku Klux Klan and was raised among the ``poorest of the poor,'' Archer enjoyed singular richness in family and a heritage of religious faith, ambition and attachment to a bountiful land. Part oral history, part autobiography, this reflective exploration of roots offers an intimate glimpse of how it once was for particular blacks in the rural Deep South. Photos not seen by PW. (Feb.)