Description: Born in Pittsylvania County, Virginia, in 1929, Mabel Walthall grew up working tobacco with her large, sharecropping family during the middle years of this' century. She was the "knee baby", the seventeenth child in the combined fourth marriage of Pency and George Walthall. Her stern father liked his independence and kept his children in school, in spite of what the boss said. Her mother was strong, warm, and competent: she could bundle tobacco all day long, or make a family dessert out of nothing but ash potatoes. Older siblings who had moved North to find work would come and go.

Although it was the Depression, and Sunday shoes were so precious they were carried, not worn, Mabel's life was full, with family and friends, church activities, work, and the humor and deviltry of a rural childhood. There were falls into the hogpen, brushes with "haints", disasterous haircuts, sibling spats, and billy goat attacks. When hardscrabble times got better, there was food -- the good fried sweet potato pies, Momma's butterbeans, bunion stew -- and the promise of an easier life to come.

This oral history is told for children in Mabel's strong voice in a series of vignettes. This is the story of an American place and time today's youth need to understand. The whites rode the school buses and the "coloreds" walked, but still there was the whole society of people, both black and white, who had little or nothing, and who got by through hard work, faith, and sharing the good things when they came.

Teachers covering a unit on the Depression, or the African-American experience in the South, will want to add this book to their shelves. It is illustrated with black-and-white photographs of the time.

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