cover image The Seventh Child: A Lucky Life

The Seventh Child: A Lucky Life

Freddie Mae Baxter. Alfred A. Knopf, $21 (240pp) ISBN 978-0-375-40620-1

An African-American woman who has struggled to live life on her own terms, Baxter recounts the story of an ordinary life transformed through determination. The seventh of eight children, she watched her mother sacrifice herself to the demands of a large family in the small farming community of Denmark, S.C., after her father suddenly departed without explanation. Following her mother's mysterious death years later, a lingering sense of loss haunted Baxter through her travails as a young woman in the Northern cities of Elizabeth, N.J., and New York City. In contrast to her sometimes sentimental recollections of Southern family life and of her siblings, Baxter's plainspoken narrative crackles with energy as she describes her early days in Harlem. She bloomed both as a woman and artist when she learned to play the saxophone, immersing herself in the jazz life of Harlem's golden age in the 1940s, and ultimately settling in that Manhattan neighborhood. Her memories of the era's leading dance bands, including those of Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington, are small, precise gems. Unfortunately, while her pronouncements on topics such as aging, children, relationships, friendship and family have an appealingly old-fashioned flavor, the book's nonlinear structure makes for occasionally bumpy reading. While lacking the vast popular appeal of the Delany sisters' Having Our Say, Baxter's story stands as a courageous account of a woman who never yielded to societal and cultural demands despite a continuous onslaught of disappointments and tragedies. 45,000 first printing. (May)