ON OUR WAY TO BEAUTIFUL

In a memoir larded with inspirational messages, its title borrowed from her syndicated column, Young describes her childhood in Shreveport, Louisiana, during the Carter and Reagan administrations.

The author’s black neighborhood, Stoner Hill, seems a throwback to an earlier time: a semi-rural world in which clichéd idylls of strawberry-picking, church attendance, and loving family gatherings contrast with the more dramatic if no less familiar incidents of violence and failed ambition that poverty engenders. Whites remain a vague enemy, seldom actually encountered. Young Londa grows up influenced by three powerful women. Londa’s mother survives being shot by her ex-husband when Londa is six to do whatever it takes to provide a stable and upwardly mobile life for her children and herself. Despite unrelenting poverty, Londa’s grandmother maintains a supportive and loving home in which she and her husband raise a passel of children. Londa’s great-grandmother, “Big Momma,” is the spiritual heart of this devoutly Baptist family, and in Big Momma’s tradition, Young cannot resist teaching lessons. Even her earliest memory, of playing musical chairs her friends in their Head Start class, makes the game an obvious metaphor for a world in which there will not be enough opportunities to go around. Smart and ambitious, Londa gets the opportunities. When the Stoner Hill kids integrate a white middle school, her mother fights to get her onto the college track, and Londa ends up a student-council member. While the always morally uplifting endings to her stories can become tiresome, the author’s sense of humor about herself is winning. Here’s a girl who can admit to following the rules in The Preppy Handbook for months without realizing that they were written in irony, but who can also admit that those Polo shirts purchased under its sway felt awfully good next to her skin.

Preachiness aside: a lively, intelligent example of African-American Christian uplift.