cover image Coming Up Down Home: A Memoir of a Southern Childhood

Coming Up Down Home: A Memoir of a Southern Childhood

Cecil Brown. Ecco Press, $24.95 (222pp) ISBN 978-0-88001-293-5

This evocative portrait of a Southern black family in the 1940s and 1950s is a work of classic proportions. It relates the joys and sorrows of two abandoned children--their father in prison and, relatives say, their ``high yaller'' mother too young and pretty to be tied down to a two-year-old and an infant. Luckily, they are looked after by wise and kind Uncle Lofton and Aunt Amanda, who live in the rural village of Bolton, N.C. Uncle Lofton has a job working on the railroad tracks, which the children admire, and Aunt Amanda sometimes lets them help her pick cotton. They grow up poor but loved. When their parents suddenly reappear after 10 years, Brown ( Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger ) and his brother Knee are cruelly wrenched from the aunt and uncle whom they regard as their real mother and father. At 13, Brown's adjustment is difficult; he fears his brutal father; his mother is no substitute for Aunt Amanda. He escapes by winning a scholarship to a local college and later he fulfills his dream of going North. Universal in many of the elements of a childhood recollected, this is a work of singular detail, and in Brown's greatly talented hands, it is totally engrossing. (July)