Two voices blend in this poignant memoir from the Civil Rights era in Mississippi--a father's and a daughter's. He was Andrew L. Jordan, a son in a dirt-poor family of sharecroppers near Greenwood. Jordana Shakoor is his little girl who grew up to write this book. In her southern childhood she is just becoming aware of her people's dreadful predicament of loving their homeland but of hating its mistreatment of blacks. Like virtually all other southern black families, the Jordans endured humiliation and fear of white reprisals.

The child states that her father rejected the ugly Jim Crow...