The Sharecropper's Daughter: A Memoir - Paperback

by Clara Petty (Author)

The author presents a powerful story of courage throughout her early life as the daughter of a poor sharecropper in the Arkansas Delta in the nineteen forties and fifties. She describes a heartbreakingly difficult childhood and adolescence which produced in her a deep well of steadfast grit while sharing in the hot, backbreaking work of harvesting a yearly cotton crop to supply food and clothing for the family. Throughout it all, her silent struggle to obtain an education is Herculean. You will laugh at the ironies of her daily life on the farm, then cry as challenges are presented that no child should ever endure. Her story also details the history of a chilling murder of a family member that resulted in a tragic massacre of black sharecroppers during her parents' generation. Later, as a naïve young wife and mother, she describes her 37-year marriage and subsequent divorce. Looking back at her life's early circumstances, the author thankfully credits them as having instilled the survival skills she later used to build a successful life out of a tenuous beginning.