Bigmama Didn't Shop at Woolworth's

Bigmamma Didn't Shop at Woolworth's. Not just because things cost more there than from the hawker who drove through the Candy Hill neighborhood from time to time, but because in the 1950s black shoppers were not very welcome in white Texas towns like Bryan. Sunny Nash was Bigmamma's granddaughter, and through her young eyes she saw not only the indignities and economic hardships her family and friends suffered - unpaved roads, mosquito-infested drainage ditches and outdoor toilets, back stairs to balcony seating in the movies - but also the love and warmth of everyday life in the segregated neighborhood. In the tradition of To Kill a Mockingbird, yet more stirring because of its real-life perspective, she tells her story of a time before the civil rights movement of the 1960s with immediacy and poignancy.

Publishers Weekly

On the outskirts of Bryan, Tex., was Candy Hill, a poor, black neighborhood like it's more aptly named neighbor Graveyard Line. Nash's memories of growing up in Candy Hill during the 1950s and early '60s are told in short vignettes gathered into loosely themed chapters. Nash's mother was a beautiful, distant woman who would force her daughter to learn willy nilly. Because her mother worked, Nash's upbringing was largely overseen by her part-Comanche grandmother, a strong, proud woman who was fanatically clean (she handled money with tweezers). Not surprisingly, the occasional fond memory of childhood in Candy Hill is overshadowed by bitterness. Nash was three when she learned her first wordcolored. "`I'm sorry I have to teach you this ugly word, colored," her grandmother told her. "But if I don't make you understand, you'll have one hurt after another all of your life." And then there was the violence of Candy Hill, most touchingly rendered in a section titled "Shooting Without a Gun." Here, Nash recalls her grandmother looking for a photograph after hearing that a cousin had been shot by her abusive boyfriend. Brilliantly, she weaves between her grandmother's worrying about the absence of a photograph to help her remember the dead and her own thoughts of where she might get bullets to repay the killer. The writing is sometimes clichd ("I thought I saw a tear sparkle on my mother's cheek as that day's last sunlight stroked her face"), and the dialogue is filled with inspiring but not terribly natural locutions. What Nash does best is open a window on a neighborhood where heroism was often a matter of just getting by. (Oct.)

Sunny Nash is an award-winning writer, exhibiting photographer, and television producer living in Long Beach, California. Her newspaper articles and photographs are in the archives of the Houston Public Library, the John F. Kennedy Library, the New York Public Library, and the Smithsonian Institution. She has written for Texas, the Sunday magazine of the Houston Chronicle.