Memoir offers a view of rural black life from woman who lived it

Not since Theodore Rosengarten's "All God's Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw" has there been such a moving and detailed narrative of rural black life. But in the case of Peggy Vonsherie Allen's "The Pecan Orchard: Journey of a Sharecropper's Daughter" (Alabama, $29.95), the experience is directly related by the one who lived it rather than filtered through the sensibilities of a white Ivy Leaguer.

Allen, the deputy director of traffic and safety engineering for DeKalb County, Ga., was born in 1959 in Butler County, Ala., near Greenville. While many readers today know Greenville as the largest concentration of restaurants, motels and gas stations between Mobile and Montgomery on I-65, during Allen's childhood it was a place "with deeply rooted Southern cultural traditions, sugarcane mills, hog killing and shotgun houses."

Among the traditions was the soul-killing practice of sharecropping — working another man's land in exchange for a share of whatever is grown — typically a life sentence of endless labor with little hope of independence. Allen's parents found themselves enmeshed in this exploitative system, and they struggled to save enough to buy their own land. But with 13 children and a constellation of legal and social impediments, the chances of success were vanishingly small.

Allen was more than willing to do her part to lift the family, but she had her own obstacles, not least a nasty case of rickets that left her nearly crippled and in constant pain. Still, her stern father expected her to labor along with her siblings from dawn to dusk.

She describes picking up pecans (for which she made three cents a pound when whites got 60 cents a pound) on a winter's morning: "I got my burlap bag and went to work. I worked very hard, picking up pecans one by one. The ground was littered with leaves almost the same color as pecans. You had to search for the nuts between the fallen leaves – and the cow manure. Willie Zed Gafford had allowed his cows to graze in the orchard and cow manure was everywhere. This was back-breaking work. Time passed slowly. In the cold damp air my nose ran constantly."...