Cotton Fields and Crazy Notions: A Daughter Remembers Life in a Sharecropper’s Family

In this remarkable memoir, retired nurse and African American patriot Gloria Rochelle details her life as a youngster growing up in the deepest part of the Deep South during the 1940's and 50's. Gripping in scope, intimate in detail, Gloria's story is a testament to the joy and laughter, the struggles and heartaches of a sharecropper's family thrust into the middle of the Civil Rights Movement at first by virtue of their birth dates and then by virtue of a federal call to justice. Walk with Gloria across Pettus Bridge during the Selma to Montgomery March; attend her as she hears the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in his church; stand in line at his bier with her after he is gunned down. And find out why Gloria believes Governor George Wallace may have received a "fly-in-amber" bum rap in today's history books. If you think you know everything there is to know about this particular time in history, you're in for some pulse-raising surprises... and more than a few unexpected tears. You can't know a man or a woman until you've walked in their and-me-down, slit-open-at-the-toes shoes. Lose yourself in a period of history that is endlessly fascinating, a cause that appeared all-but-futile from Dixieland's African American perspective. But they just kept marching, kept believing, kept dying, and kept praying. Today President Barack Obama stands as stark testimony to the continuing promise of the hard-won legacies that people like Gloria Rochelle helped make happen.