THIS CHILD'S GONNA LIVE

This takes place in a shantytown, sandy, disease ridden, starving South just a generation or so after the Civil War. Mariah Upshur is the black woman who has fallen under a different kind of slavery--bound and chained to a bleak circumstance known as Tangierneck, the scruffy community where she breaks her back getting enough potatoes for the table and her two youngsters Skeeter and Rabbit. Her husband, Jacob, is a discontented, displaced man whose land inheritance has almost been lost to Miss Bannie, a white woman with a strange hold on his father. Jacob is obstinately proud, too proud for the welfare handouts that might make life endurable. This follows the emotions of both characters as Mariah, after the terrible loss of a newborn child, determines to get free of Tangierneck and save her children. An impossible hope since Tangierneck is a self-generating bog. Jacob, in the meantime, is working up enough desperate emotion to confront his father and perhaps kill Miss Bannie but it is Mariah who is ultimately faced with the opportunity and the act. This is almost overbearingly emotional but with some powerful scenes and good Southern ghetto dialogue. A high-toned black soap opera.