Beatrice's Ledger

Beatrice's Ledger is a story about family, memory, and the power of homeplace. (Reminds me of Mildred Taylor, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry - 1976 / Logan Family Saga series and Mamie Garvin Fields, Lemon Swamp and Other Places: A Carolina Memoir - Free Press, 1983). Ruth Martin grew up in Smoaks, South Carolina, a small town in Colleton County. It was once the land of plantations, slavery, and cotton. By the time Ruth Martin was born in 1930 many of the plantations were gone and slavery had ended, but the cotton remained. Her family made a living working the land as sharecroppers. Her father supplemented the family income working as a supervisor at a local grist and sawmill. They worked hard, but did not own the land and Martin offers vivid descriptionsof the sometimes perilous existence of a Black family living in the Jim Crow South. But there was joy as well as hardship and readers will be drawn into the story of life in Smoaks. Martin brings to life the place and its citizens with colorful prose andcareful reconstruction. In addition to her own memory, Martin conducted numerous interviews and tracked down deeds and land records to confirm her recollections. Among the documents that she relies upon is a ledger that her mother, Beatrice, kept and that survives as a family heirloom. Well-worn and with some pages missing -- having been torn out and repurposed as grocery lists and scrap paper through the years -- the ledger serves as a starting and ending point to the book. It recounts the triumphs and travails of one Black family in the rural twentieth century South. Written in a lively style, Beatrice's Ledger is reminiscent of the best of southern memoir, combining history, storytelling, and family folklore to tell a compelling narrative of growing up as a Black girl in the Jim Crow South. Martin, a trained social worker and skilled practitioner of oral history, gathers stories from many former residents of Smoaks, both white and Black, in order to inform her narrative. The book offers a window into the day-to-day lives of African Americans living in the early twentieth-century South. Infused with history, humor, and a southerner's ability to tell a good story, readers of all types will find something to enjoy about this first-hand account--