Thordis Simonsen, Editor

You May Plow Here

Foreword by Robert Coles

The daughter of a freeholder, Sara Brooks was born in 1911 on her parents' subsistence farm in west Alabama. Here, in her own words, she makes us understand what it felt like to be young, black, innocent, and steeped in the ways of a black rural world that has largely been lost to us.

"A wonderful book—funny, sad, packed with action and information about life in black Alabama in the decades before World War II. . . . A welcome addition to the growing body of books by and about black women." —Dorothy Sterling, author of We Are Your Sisters

"A profoundly poignant yet triumphant book, a recreation by an Alabama-born black of her struggle against racism and poverty while striving for the common dream of Americans. . . . A marvelously earthy 'narrative.' . . . Her memoir is the stuff of human pride made memorable in raw, homely vernacular." —Publishers Weekly

"A joy and revelation. . . . A story about immense courage, faith and spirit." —Washington Post

"Now we have a women's narrative to stand alongside those of Nate Shaw and Hosea Hudson. I found the description of farm life unusually evocative, the narrator's 'voice' distinctive, consistent, and a lift to the spirit, the story of marriage and work life honest and human." —Jacquelyn Hall, director, Southern Oral History Program, University of North Carolina