Southern Memoirs

From his humble beginnings in Sumter, South Carolina, to his prominence on the Washington, D.C., political scene as the third highest-ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives, U.S. Congressman James E. Clyburn has led an extraordinary life. In Blessed Experiences, Clyburn tells in his own inspirational words how an African-American boy from the Jim Crow-era South was able to beat the odds to achieve great success.

Baseball, religion, work, death, and the company store - these figured eminently in the lives of Southern cotton mill workers and their families during the early decades of the 20th century. In this firsthand account of his native Bladenboro, North Carolina, George G. Suggs, Jr., captures in rich detail the world of a thriving cotton mill town where the company was dominant but workers had forged a strong community. Here the focus is on the workers - their interests, personalities, and values - in their best and in their darker moments.

For a long time, Edie thought she had escaped. It started in an Appalachian trailer park, where a young girl dreamed of becoming a doctor. But every day Edie woke up to her reality: a poverty-stricken world full of alcohol and violence, where getting out seemed impossible. She taught herself to drive a stick shift truck at 12 years old so she could get her drunk daddy home from the bar. She spent Saturdays at Brushy Mountain prison visiting her incarcerated cousin. She watched adults eat while her stomach gnawed.

The Beak in the Heart is a memoir of growing up “Southern”. Betina Enzminger shares the poignant tales of women who preceded her - misfit women who defied authority and suffered the consequences in the repressive South Carolina of the 19th and 20th centuries. Entzminger links several generations of women from pre-Civil War years to the present, and also shares candid details of her rebellious youth and her own struggles with marriage and parenthood.

The listener who has grown up in the South will swear that he knows each and every character in these tales - from the "Indian doctor" with the secret hemorrhoid cure to the bull who couldn't keep his "loins" out of reach of the youngster's BB gun; he'll identify with Bubba gigging for Giant Southern Frogs and with the curious cat that burned the cabin down; he'll remember high-school teammates like "Shorty" and "Speedy", as well as college fraternity brothers like "Snake" and "Stud". And he'll laugh while remembering.

Prohibition. Mobsters, murder, and mayhem. FBI agents. Cops, robbers, and worse. Sound like the background for a Hollywood epic? It's Ernest Marquez's latest very true story of the renowned gambling ships that anchored in Santa Monica Bay in the 1920s and 1930s. It's the story of Tony Cornero, the cockiest gangster who ever bootlegged a bottle of scotch, the man who helped found Las Vegas, and the smooth operator of the most glamorous gambling ship in the Pacific, the Rex.

Inspired by a colleague's involvement in the Mississippi Summer Project of 1964, Wall Street attorney Donald A. Jelinek traveled to the Deep South to volunteer as a civil rights lawyer during his three-week summer vacation in 1965. He stayed for three years. In White Lawyer, Black Power, Jelinek recounts the battles he fought in defense of militant civil rights activists and rural African Americans, risking his career and his life to further the struggle for racial equality.

Written in the form of a letter to her granddaughter, the author of this little book describes her plantation childhood, her marriage and parenthood, and her experiences during the Civil War and Reconstruction. In response to what she believed were misconceptions about antebellum Southern slavery, she argues that while some slaveholders were cruel, the majority were conscientious about the well-being of their servants and looked upon them as members of the household.

After an arduous overland journey, Levi Scott and his son John arrived in Oregon City in November 1844. Scott joined the Jesse Applegate's 1846 expedition seeking a better, safer way through the Cascades to the Willamette Valley. Their new southern route wound through the Umpqua Valley, three mountain ranges, and the Black Rock Desert before meeting the established California Trail.

Through anecdotal humor, Jim Lindsey shares tales of growing up in the South; life in Hollywood as an actor, model, and advertising executive; falling in and out of love; raising children; and living in the turbulent times we face. In poems and jokes, quotes and stories, Jim paints a picture of a long life lived within the wide boundaries of love and loss, joy and sorrow. He shares his story so that listeners are taken back to a simpler era in our nation and given inspiration to return to those roots.

This audiobook tells the story of the Brown family of Caswell County, NC, and their journey over four generations, captured in short stories, vignettes, and whimsical narrative glimpses. The Brown family’s journey began two generations earlier with my grandmother’s grandmother, Queen Evans, who was kidnapped in Africa and brought to North Carolina as a slave on a plantation of a White slave owner. One of the many duties of Queen, the seven-year-old enslaved girl, was to serve as a “foot-warmer”.

Lee St. John is a she-devil with a halo, a Southern Belle who doesn't play by the rules, and a prankster setting her next trap. But like a train wreck, we can't help but peek at her shenanigans. She is just plain naughty but with a heart. The mementos found in her closet, attic, basement, and even her school classroom unleash her secrets about mothers, husbands, former boyfriends, children, friends, jobs, families, students, and more.

Before you listen to any of this book, Jimmie asks your permission to speak freely. If you wear your feelings on your sleeves, he asks you to go topless. Now grab a beverage of your choice, sit back, and let's experience life in the Deep South through the eyes of a Black man. This book takes both prose and poetry and walks you through life experiences and living in a culture where color still makes a difference.

How would you be affected if your mother died giving your life? And how would such a loss affect your children? These questions are the foundation of many issues raised by the author in her search for the missing pieces of a grandmother who in 1905 died giving the author's mother life. It was a tragedy that seemed to affect multiple generations, the voids in identity and ill-spent guilt flowing from the stream of blood that kept mother from daughter, and then from granddaughter. But it was a search well-spent.

Spend an evening with famous southern writer Rick Bragg, listening to him as I did, then wonder as I did, why there wasn't a black face in the house. Maybe there isn't a reason. Maybe there is. Rick Bragg says that no writer tells the whole truth. I tried to...As I saw it. That didn't go over to well...With a special someone in Rick's life. As you will see.

In Snippets of Truths, author Mary Hardy shares the stories of her youth while growing up in rural Southern Mississippi in the '50s and '60s. A collection of anecdotes and vignettes, this memoir narrates the memorable experiences of Hardy's childhood. From the large to the small, and from the ordinary and everyday to the remarkable, Snippets of Truths recalls a wide array of events living on a farm, working in the fields, attending school, participating as a majorette, becoming homecoming queen, making homemade ice cream, and creating dolls out of Coca Cola bottles.

Come spend Memorial Day at a small city in the Deep South. You may be surprised at what you see and hear. I was.