An Hour Before Daylight: Memories of a Rural Boyhood
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Overview
In an American story of enduring importance, Jimmy Carter re-creates his Depression-era boyhood on a Georgia farm, before the civil rights movement that changed it and the country.In what is sure to become a classic, the bestselling author of Living Faith and Sources of Strength writes about the powerful rhythms of countryside and community in a sharecropping economy. Along the way, he offers an unforgettable portrait of his father, a brilliant farmer and strict segregationist who treated black workers with his own brand of "separate" respect and fairness, and his strong-willed and well-read mother, a nurse who cared for all in need -- regardless of their position in the community.
Carter describes the five other people who shaped his early life, only two of them white: his eccentric relatives who sometimes caused the boy to examine his heritage with dismay; the boyhood friends with whom he hunted with slingshots and boomerangs and worked the farm, but who could not attend the same school; and the eminent black bishop who refused to come to the Carters' back door but who would stand near his Cadillac in the front yard discussing crops and politics with Jimmy's father.
Carter's clean and eloquent prose evokes a time when the cycles of life were predictable and simple and the rules were heartbreaking and complex. In his singular voice and with a novelist's gift for detail, Jimmy Carter creates a sensitive portrait of an era that shaped the nation.
An Hour Before Daylight is destined to stand with other timeless works of American literature.
Synopsis
In his singular voice and with a novelist's gift for detail, Jimmy Carter creates a sensitive portrait of an era that shaped the nation.
New York Times Book Review - Roy Reed
The nation should be grateful that he took up writing. He has the gift of language, and he has plenty to say. The new book is more than a memoir; it is also a carefully researched document of a time and place . . .
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
Jimmy Carter's single term as chief executive may not be viewed today as a terribly successful one, but he is among our hardest working and most respected former presidents, working tirelessly for the cause of human rights around the world and devoting great time and energy to the struggle to overcome homelessness here in the United States through his involvement with the organization Habitat for Humanity. In his new memoir, An Hour Before Daylight, Carter revisits his childhood in rural Georgia and considers the ways his youthful experiences have affected his adult life.Roy Reed
The nation should be grateful that he took up writing. He has the gift of language, and he has plenty to say. The new book is more than a memoir; it is also a carefully researched document of a time and place . . .— New York Times Book Review
From The Critics
Farm life is becoming increasingly unfamiliar. Most Americans know little to nothing about crop rotation, plowing fields, slaughtering hogs or clipping wing feathers of geese. And many, I imagine, don't feel like they're missing much by not knowing.The surprise of Jimmy Carter's new memoir, An Hour Before Daylight, is not that he knows so much about farming, but that his description of it is so engaging. In simple, precise language, Carter describes the many chores of daily farm existence, such as cotton mopping, a procedure to protect cotton from boll weevils and worms. "Beginning as a small child just able to carry a gallon bucket, I had a continuing job during the growing season of mixing arsenic, molasses and water in a large barrel and then helping to apply it by hand to the central buds of every cotton plant in Daddy's fields." Once past the initial shock of imagining children handling poison, you realize how radically different a farming childhood is from one lived in, say, the contemporary suburbs. The world Carter evokes is one literally lived close to the ground: "I preferred to plow without wearing shoes, and I remember vividly the caress of the soft, damp and cool freshly turned earth on my feet."
It's almost unimaginable that a recent president of the largest, most powerful nation on earth, spent most of his childhood barefoot. Yet Carter's early existence just outside Plains, Georgia, probably had more in common with ancient worlds than millennial America.
Carter writes, "Jesus and even Moses would have felt at home on a farm in the Deep South during the first third of the twentieth century." A strength of the memoir is that itisn't self-obsessed or self-aggrandizing. While many American memoirs imitate the Benjamin Franklin model of "How I became a self-made man and what I accomplished," Carter follows the Southern autobiographical tradition. Here emphasis falls on the community: the people, places and customs that shaped the individual. We learn much about Carter's parents, particularly his father, Earl; his relatives, like Uncle Buddy; and the black tenant farmers who lived nearby. Black-white relations, in fact, becomes a recurring theme of the memoir.
Carter credits several blacks with profoundly affecting his life, though he does not always make it clear how they influenced him or what exactly they gave him. Carter also sprinkles in engaging anecdotes about his early years. We hear of how he approached baseball legends Frankie Frisch and Pepper Martin for an autograph, only for Martin to reply, "Get your ass off the field, boy!" We discover that he and his family used an outhouse and "wiped with old newspapers or pages torn from Sears, Roebuck catalogues." And we hear that Carter did "some enthusiastic petting" in the back seat of cars.
An Hour Before Daylight, like Reynolds Price's classic memoir Clear Pictures, offers a rich, detailed portrait of a way of life that is mostly gone: a rural, small-town existence in which people lived outdoors, knew one another and didn't spend their evenings in front of television or a computer monitor. However, unlike Price's memoir, Carter's is too loosely organized and doesn't build toward specific revelations. While Carter is very good with detail and graceful with language, there is little analysis. Further, the memoir lacks tension and conflict; there are no painful episodes that might reveal his inner struggles.
In spite of these flaws, however, the memoir remains useful—in part, because Carter succeeded so far beyond expectations. One can study his early life as if a blueprint for future achievement. After all, how could a farm boy from a family in which no one graduated from high school become president?
While Carter offers no explicit answers, we see how his childhood shaped him into a confident, independent, thoughtful adult. Early responsibility surely enabled this. At age five, Carter sold boiled peanuts on the streets of Plains, and by sixteen he was measuring crop land for the Agricultural Adjustment Administration. While parents today fret about their children growing up too fast, children in Carter's community were plowing fields, handling poison, castrating pigs and hearing stories on the streets of Plains about the whorehouses in nearby Albany, Georgia.
I can surely imagine people a hundred years from now reading Carter's memoir and marveling at the simplistic, rural childhood of this former president who lived in an age of nuclear weapons, space travel and Internet technology. An Hour Before Daylight is a thoguhtful, intelligent and eloquent book.
—James Schiff
Marilyn Gardner
Engagingly modest...Blessed with a keen memory and the humility to recount painful and embarassing experiences, Carter has written a book that valuable on several levels. Part history, part sociology, it offers a window on a bygone agrigultural world. It also quietly illustrates the importance of nurturing children with high expectations, early responsibility, and enduring values. Above all, his memoir offers and affecting chronicle of the early years of a barefoot boy from backwater Georgia who eventually walked his way into history books as the 39th president.—Christian Science Monitor