HALLELUJAH, MISSISSIPPI

Some vital statistics from the author's thickly populated memory on his birthplace, Hallelujah, a town of 2,000 people, 120 miles south of Memphis, provides much of the color- black and white- and culture as he knew it when a boy. From The Green Front Store where his father sold general merchandise, to the churches and the revivals, to the politics and the newspaper, he wanders into the kitchen, and the Fair, the school and the bank. There are stories of Victorian type romances, of Negroes who enriched white lives, of the banker who was the mayor, of the coming of the auto, of the farmers and the share system, of the amusements and diversions and of the battleground over which the Lost Cause continued to be fought. The things that loomed large in a boy's life present a panorama of small town patterns in an unpretentious manner.