Author Description

"Steeped in the lively cadences of black speech and the art of storytelling, Leaving Pipe Shop is one woman's reclamation of her family's history and ultimately her own. Clear-eyed, yet with feeling and delicacy, Deborah E. McDowell offers this moving and textured meditation on the ties of kin and the claims of memory.". "More than a simple coming-of-age story, Leaving Pipe Shop is an evocation of growing up black in the South on the eve of the tumultuous sixties, a portrait of a culture in transition, of a Southern world in the throes of political and economic change. Here is the debut of a rich and powerful voice in American memoir."--BOOK JACKET.