Sylvia Maner Nickels

Many books have been written around the stereotype of growing up in the poor, rural South. Through them a person might think that anyone who grew up in the sharecropper poverty of the pre-industrial South was the worst kind of 'poor, white trash'... This is not true. The legacy my Daddy and Mother left their eight children was not houses and possessions. Those things can be acquired with a little motivation and work, as their children and grandchildren pretty well demonstrate. Most evidence of sharecropper life in the post-depression and pre- and post-World War II South is as 'gone with the wind' as Scarlett O'Hara's early life. Probably this is a good thing. I hope this account of one family's experience of that time will interest some readers.