You May Plow Here: The Narrative of Sara Brooks

“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 of books by and about black women.” —Dorothy Sterling, author of We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century 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.