Overview

First published in 1958 and selected by the New York Times as one of the best books of the year, Willie Mae is a first-person account of a black woman's life and her experiences as a domestic worker in a succession of southern households in the first half of the century. Powerful and poignant, sometimes funny and always honest, Willie Mae is a testament to the courage and strength of a generation of women who struggled to survive with dignity and humanity in the years before the civil rights movement.

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9780820323763

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Reviews

Poignant as a spiritual and lyrical as the blues. -- San Francisco Chronicle

The sociology, the economics, the politics, are all implicit in Willie Mae's story. . . . She knows hunger ('if you eat laundry starch, you don't be hungry for anything else much'), and humor, large losses and small gains--and from it all gathers unto herself a tough, resilient sort of wisdom. --New Republic Honestly, unsentimentally, but movingly Willie Mae reminds us of how far the boundaries of racial repression have shifted and yet how far they still bind us as a nation. It is time for a new generation to hear her story. --Dan T. Carter One of the first books to bring the contemporary problems of African Americans (especially African-American women) to the attention of a large national audience . . . Untold thousands of women struggled in similar circumstances, and this record of her daily trials reveals how much the Civil Rights Movement accomplished. --Los Angeles Times Book Review Poignant as a spiritual and lyrical as the blues. --San Francisco Chronicle Willie Mae speaks with a voice of wisdom, suffering, truth, and joy. It is a voice gentle on our ears but ruthless on our consciences--a voice worth heeding, still and again, in these edgy times. --Bill Moyers

Author Information

ELIZABETH KYTLE's books include Willie Mae and The Voices of Robby Wilde (both Georgia).

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