Download or read book Born in the Delta written by Margaret Bolsterli and published by University of Arkansas Press. This book was released on 2000-07-01 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this gracefully written memoir, Margaret Jones Bolsterli recounts her experiences as a lively, observant girl coming of age on an Arkansas cotton farm during the 1930s and 1940s. The Mississippi River's broad, flat floodplain provides the setting for her vivid strokes of memory and history each portraying key elements of the "southern sensibility." Bolsterli's themes include the southerner's strong sense of place, the penchant for stories rather than true dialog, a caste system based on formality and race, the underlying current of violence, and the repressive function of evangelical religion. She also examines manners, the patriarchal family structure, the "southern belle" concept, and the persistence of the memory of the Civil War. A fascinating chapter on food indicates how African and European customs are melded in southern cuisine to include chicken, pork, "cracklin' bread," gravy and biscuits, field peas, turnip greens, butter beans, devil's food cake, and dill pickles. Comparable to Shirley Abbott's Womenfolks, Born in the Delta is a valuable resource for those interested in southern history and culture, as well as readers who just enjoy a good story, well-told.
Download or read book During Wind and Rain written by Margaret Jones Bolsterli and published by University of Arkansas Press. This book was released on 2008-04-01 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "During Wind and Rain moves from the land's acquisition in 1848 through the Civil War and Reconstruction, the 1927 Flood, the Great Depression, and the drought of 1930 to the modern considerations of mechanization, fertilizer, pesticides, and irrigation. The transformation of dense swamp and forest to today's commercial agriculture is the story of two hundred acres worked by people sowing their fate with sweat, ingenuity, and luck."--Jacket.
Download or read book Death in the Delta written by Molly Walling and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2012-09-07 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Growing up, Molly Walling could not fathom the source of the dark and intense discomfort in her family home. Then in 2006 she discovered her father's complicity in the murder of two black men on December 12, 1946, in Anguilla, deep in the Mississippi Delta. Death in the Delta tells the story of one woman's search for the truth behind a closely held, sixty-year old family secret. Though the author's mother and father decided that they would protect their three children from that past, its effect was profound. When the story of a fatal shoot-out surfaced, apprehension turned into a devouring need to know. Each of Walling's trips from North Carolina to the Delta brought unsettling and unexpected clues. After a hearing before an all-white grand jury, her father's case was not prosecuted. Indeed, it appeared as if the incident never occurred, and he resumed his life as a small-town newspaper editor. Yet family members of one of the victims tell her their stories. A ninety-three-year-old black historian and witness gives context and advice. A county attorney suggests her family's history of commingling with black women was at the heart of the deadly confrontation. Firsthand the author recognizes how privilege, entitlement, and racial bias in a wealthy, landed southern family resulted in a deadly abuse of power followed by a stifling, decades-long cover up. Death in the Delta is a deeply personal account of a quest to confront a terrible legacy. Against the advice and warnings of family, Walling exposes her father's guilty agency in the deaths of Simon Toombs and David Jones. She also exposes his gift as a writer and creative thinker. The author, grappling with wrenching issues of family and honor, was long conflicted about making this story public. But her mission became one of hope that confronting the truth might somehow move others toward healing and reconciliation.
Download or read book Delta Rainbow written by Sally Palmer Thomason and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2016-06-09 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Betty Bobo Pearson (b. 1922), a seventh-generation, plantation-born Mississippian, defied her cultural heritage—and caused great personal pain for her parents and herself—when she became an activist in the civil rights movement. Never fearing to break the mold in her search for the “best,” in her nineties she remains a strong, effective leader with a fun-loving, generous spirit. When Betty was eighteen months old, a train smashed into the car her mother was driving, killing Betty's beloved grandfather and severely injuring her grandmother. Thrown onto the engine's cow catcher, Betty lived and did not remember the accident. She did, however, grow up to fulfill her grandmother's prediction: “Betty, God reached down and plucked you from in front of that train because he has something very special he wants you to do with your life.” In 1943, twenty-one-year-old Betty, soon to graduate from the University of Mississippi, received a full-tuition scholarship to Columbia Graduate School in New York City. Ecstatic, she rushed home to tell her parents. “ABSOLUTELY NOT. There is no way I'll allow my daughter to live in Yankee Land,” her father replied. After fierce argument and much door slamming, Betty could not defy her father. But she had to show him she was her own person. Her nation was at war—so Betty joined the Marines. After the war, Betty married Bill Pearson and became mistress of Rainbow Plantation in the Delta. In 1955, she attended the Emmett Till trial (accompanied by her close friend and budding civil rights activist Florence Mars) and was shocked by the virulent degree of racism she witnessed there. Seeing her world in a new way, she became a courageous and dedicated supporter of the civil rights movement. Her activities severely fractured her close relationship with her parents. Yet, as a warm friend and bold, persuasive leader, Betty made an indelible mark in her church, in the Delta communities, in the lives of the people she employed, and in her beautiful garden at Rainbow.
Download or read book Delta Jewels written by Alysia Burton Steele and published by Center Street. This book was released on 2015-04-07 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inspired by memories of her beloved grandmother, photographer and author Alysia Burton Steele -- picture editor on a Pulitzer Prize-winning team -- combines heart-wrenching narrative with poignant photographs of more than 50 female church elders in the Mississippi Delta. These ordinary women lived extraordinary lives under the harshest conditions of the Jim Crow era and during the courageous changes of the Civil Rights Movement. With the help of local pastors, Steele recorded these living witnesses to history and folk ways, and shares the significance of being a Black woman -- child, daughter, sister, wife, mother, and grandmother in Mississippi -- a Jewel of the Delta. From the stand Mrs. Tennie Self took for her marriage to be acknowledged in the phone book, to the life-threatening sacrifice required to vote for the first time, these 50 inspiring portraits are the faces of love and triumph that will teach readers faith and courage in difficult times.
Download or read book Delta Style written by Delta Burke and published by St. Martin's Griffin. This book was released on 2013-12-17 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Meet Delta Burke - beloved star of Designing Women, accomplished actress, founding partner of Delta Burke Design, a sassy, glamorous actress for whom learning to live as a "real-size" woman has presented all kinds of opportunities. A beauty-pageant winner, Delta had a much publicized weight gain during Designing Women and was the subject of press speculation and gossip. But as she started to come to terms with the fact that her body would always be full figured, she found her fans loved her all the more, and the outpouring of support began to compensate for the emotional strain. With wit, honesty, and directness, she discusses the pain she felt, her agonizing efforts to achieve a size 6 body, and her own journey to self-acceptance, which led her to found Delta Burke Design, a clothing company for the real-size woman. Filled with inspirational motivational advice, humorous anecdotes, and style tips from this nationally adored celebrity, Delta Style shows how positive thinking can transform your state of mind and give you the confidence to live up to your own - ond only your own - expectations. Beautiful Delta is a perfect role model for the millions of women who find coping with a real-size body requires strategy and acceptance, as will as for those coptivated by her screen presence and smart, upbeat approach to life.
Download or read book The Delta written by Tony Park and published by Tony Park. This book was released on 2020-05-17 with total page 538 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mercenary Sonja Kurtz is brought out of retirement to blow up a dam and save an African wildlife paradise. Retired mercenary Sonja Kurtz is recruited to blow up a dam that threatens the existence of Botswana's premier wildlife area, the Okavango Delta. A coalition of environmentalists and safari lodge owners, including Sonja's former lover, Stirling Smith, are determined to see the dam destroyed, at any cost, but there are deals and double crosses going on behind the scenes. Well-meaning American wildlife researcher turned reality TV star, 'Coyote' Sam Chapman stumbles into the middle of the conflict and Sonja finds herself having to babysit a film crew while planning her daring raid. Old flames and new ones, a rebellious teenage daughter, and her estranged father are all in Sonja's sights as her mission to save The Delta turns into a full-blown civil war and a race to protect the one person she really cares for.
Download or read book Delta Epiphany written by Ellen B. Meacham and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2018-04-02 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In April 1967, a year before his run for president, Senator Robert F. Kennedy knelt in a crumbling shack in Mississippi trying to coax a response from a listless child. The toddler sat picking at dried rice and beans spilled over the dirt floor as Kennedy, former US attorney general and brother to a president, touched the boy's distended stomach and stroked his face and hair. After several minutes with little response, the senator walked out the back door, wiping away tears. In Delta Epiphany: Robert F. Kennedy in Mississippi, Ellen B. Meacham tells the story of Kennedy's visit to the Delta, while also examining the forces of history, economics, and politics that shaped the lives of the children he met in Mississippi in 1967 and the decades that followed. The book includes thirty-seven powerful photographs, a dozen published here for the first time. Kennedy's visit to the Mississippi Delta as part of a Senate subcommittee investigation of poverty programs lasted only a few hours, but Kennedy, the people he encountered, Mississippi, and the nation felt the impact of that journey for much longer. His visit and its aftermath crystallized many of the domestic issues that later moved Kennedy toward his candidacy for the presidency. Upon his return to Washington, Kennedy immediately began seeking ways to help the children he met on his visit; however, his efforts were frustrated by institutional obstacles and blocked by powerful men who were indifferent and, at times, hostile to the plight of poor black children. Sadly, we know what happened to Kennedy, but this book also introduces us to three of the children he met on his visit, including the baby on the floor, and finishes their stories. Kennedy talked about what he had seen in Mississippi for the remaining fourteen months of his life. His vision for America was shaped by the plight of the hungry children he encountered there.
Download or read book Delta Wedding written by Eudora Welty and published by HMH. This book was released on 1979-03-21 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This novel of a Mississippi family in the 1920s “presents the essence of the Deep South and does it with infinite finesse” (The Christian Science Monitor). From one of the most treasured American writers, winner of a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize, comes Delta Wedding, a vivid and charming portrait of Southern life. Set in 1923, the story is centered on the Fairchilds, a big and clamorous family, who live on a plantation in the Mississippi delta. They are in the midst of planning their daughter’s wedding when a nine-year-old relative, Laura McRaven, whose mother has just died, comes to visit. Drama leads to drama, revelation to revelation, in a novel that is “nothing short of wonderful” (The New Yorker). The result is a sometimes-riotous view of a Southern family, and the parentless child who learns to become one of them.
Download or read book Kaleidoscope written by Margaret Jones Bolsterli and published by University of Arkansas Press. This book was released on 2015-04-15 with total page 135 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2005 Margaret Jones Bolsterli learned that her great-great-grandfather was a free mulatto named Jordan Chavis, who owned an antebellum plantation near Vicksburg, Mississippi. The news was a shock; Bolsterli had heard about the plantation in family stories told during her Arkansas Delta childhood, but Chavis’s name and race had never been mentioned. With further exploration Bolsterli found that when Chavis’s children crossed the Mississippi River between 1859 and 1875 for exile in Arkansas, they passed into the white world, leaving the family’s racial history completely behind. Kaleidoscope is the story of this discovery, and it is the story, too, of the rise and fall of the Chavis fortunes in Mississippi, from the family’s first appearance on a frontier farm in 1829 to ownership of over a thousand acres and the slaves to work them by 1860. Bolsterli learns that in the 1850s, when all free colored people were ordered to leave Mississippi or be enslaved, Jordan Chavis’s white neighbors successfully petitioned the legislature to allow him to remain, unmolested, even as three of his sons and a daughter moved to Arkansas and Illinois. She learns about the agility with which the old man balanced on a tightrope over chaos to survive the war and then take advantage of the opportunities of newly awarded citizenship during Reconstruction. The story ends with the family’s loss of everything in the 1870s, after one of the exiled sons returns to Mississippi to serve in the Reconstruction legislature and a grandson attempts unsuccessfully to retain possession of the land. In Kaleidoscope, long-silenced truths are revealed, inviting questions about how attitudes toward race might have been different in the family and in America if the truth about this situation and thousands of others like it could have been told before.
Download or read book Sunshine in the Delta written by Erica M. Sandifer and published by Palmetto Publishing Group. This book was released on 2017-08-25 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From author Erica Sandifer comes Sunshine in the Delta, a tale of life and love and everything in between, set in the Mississippi Delta during the early 1960s. Money, Mississippi, just beyond the Tallahatchie River, the town is a vast, flat land with fields of corn and cotton, split in half by the long and dusty Money Road. Right alongside the road in an old shack, lives Miss Neeyla Jean, along with her six younger siblings, a mean-spirited mother, and a blatantly belligerent father. Because of her parent's tumultuous relationship, Neeyla is responsible for caring for her siblings. As a result, she leaves school at the age of fourteen to find a job. It is then that her beautiful-but mischievous-older cousin, Reena, finds her a job housecleaning at the Bakers. Neeyla begins working for Mrs. Baker and her handsome, blue-eyed son, Henry. When Neeyla loses her younger brother to a train accident, further dividing her family, her bond with Mrs. Baker allows her to cope-and the friendship they share teaches her important life-long lessons along the way. Miss Neeyla Jean becomes the very definition of the word triumph, overcoming obstacle after obstacle, and she eventually realizes an enduring fact of life: The sun will always shine brightly after the storm.
Download or read book Rescue My Child written by Neil C. Livingstone and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Very Good,No Highlights or Markup,all pages are intact.
Download or read book Escaping the Delta written by Elijah Wald and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2012-04-24 with total page 510 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The life of blues legend Robert Johnson becomes the centerpiece for this innovative look at what many consider to be America's deepest and most influential music genre. Pivotal are the questions surrounding why Johnson was ignored by the core black audience of his time yet now celebrated as the greatest figure in blues history. Trying to separate myth from reality, biographer Elijah Wald studies the blues from the inside -- not only examining recordings but also the recollections of the musicians themselves, the African-American press, as well as examining original research. What emerges is a new appreciation for the blues and the movement of its artists from the shadows of the 1930s Mississippi Delta to the mainstream venues frequented by today's loyal blues fans.
Download or read book Bridge Over Troubled Dreams written by Delta Goodrem and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-05-14 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The emotional stories behind Delta Goodrem’s sixth studio album. This eBook features an exclusive bonus chapter about the song Power from the Bridge Over Troubled Dreams album. In her first-ever book, Australian singer-songwriter Delta Goodrem shares the intimate stories behind each of the tracks on her sixth studio album, Bridge Over Troubled Dreams, taking readers on a deep dive into her inspiration for each song and revealing the truth behind the lyrics. From the touching account of her birth – two months premature – to battling bouts of missing home and many incredible self-discoveries along the way, Bridge Over Troubled Dreams is truly the book of the artist’s life. She speaks candidly about love, family, highs and lows, patience, freedom, faith, hope and survival, and how she uses lessons learned to drive herself forward. Delta’s heartfelt stories are accompanied by never-before-seen pictures from her personal collection: candid behind-the-scenes shots, unreleased tour photos and even personal snaps from her childhood.
Download or read book Delta Belles written by Penelope J. Stokes and published by . This book was released on 2007-02 with total page 518 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1965, four best friends at a Mississippi college form a singing group and call themselves The Delta Belles. Twenty-five years later, the Belles are asked to get back together for their college reunion. As the old friends reconnect, they come to a new understanding of the meaning and value of their lives.
Download or read book Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta written by Debjani Bhattacharyya and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-24 with total page 485 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What happens when a distant colonial power tries to tame an unfamiliar terrain in the world's largest tidal delta? This history of dramatic ecological changes in the Bengal Delta from 1760 to 1920 involves land, water and humans, tracing the stories and struggles that link them together. Pushing beyond narratives of environmental decline, Bhattacharyya argues that 'property-thinking', a governing tool critical in making land and water discrete categories of bureaucratic and legal management, was at the heart of colonial urbanization and the technologies behind the draining of Calcutta. The story of ecological change is narrated alongside emergent practices of land speculation and transformation in colonial law. Bhattacharyya demonstrates how this history continues to shape our built environments with devastating consequences, as shown in the Bay of Bengal's receding coastline.
Download or read book The Jewel of the Delta written by Floyd Stokes and published by . This book was released on 2016-11-15 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Jewel of the Delta is about how two former slaves, Isaiah T. Montgomery and Benjamin T. Green, established an all-black town in the Deep South of the Mississippi Delta. Through hard work and sheer determination, they and other brave settlers persevered to build a thriving town. The book covers the history of the town from its inception through the 1950's. The author, Floyd Stokes, was born and raised in Mound Bayou and draws from the rich history passed down from generation to generation.
