Delta Fragments: The Recollections of a Sharecropper's Son John O.Hodges. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2013.

Abstract

Delta Fragments: Recollections of a Sharecropper's Son John O. Hodges. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2013.By today's standards, John Hodges grew up in what can only be called impoverished conditions: a three-room shotgun shack without running water, located on a Mississippi Congressman's plantation. He ended up a professor of religious studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. In this memoir of sorts, Hodges recounts his formative years (the late 1950s and early 1960s) in the Mississippi Delta up until he moved to attend Morehouse College. Delta Fragments provides short recollections and reflections on a variety of topics that primarily revolve around issues of race. book is divided into two parts. first part comprises about one-third of the work and provides background on the region but focuses primarily on Hodges's family and his childhood. second part comprises the remaining two-thirds and delves into many of the issues raised and suggested by the first third, primarily religion, segregation, the civil rights movement, and the everyday struggles of the mostly poor African American population in the Delta. By Hodges's own admission, many of the chapters may come across fragmentary, incomplete and undeveloped, but he asks readers to view them as an opportunity to provide one's own perspective and to draw his or her own conclusions (xvii). To that end, Hodges often provides thoughtful questions, such in The Black Preacher when he asks How could he allow civil rights workers to speak about voter registration matters to church members who depended on whites for their jobs? (129). Many of the topics he broaches and the questions he asks could be used in an undergraduate classroom setting to help stimulate provocative discussions.The short chapters (they average about six pages) address a broad range of subjects. first third is devoted to chapters about his mother, stepfather, sister, parts of his extended family, the Whittington plantation, childhood friends, and his schooling among others. second part of the book features two main clusters addressing the African American church and the civil rights movement, in which Hodges participated a young man. He compares his book to autobiographies by David Cohn and William Alexander Percy and explains that it provides an updated view of the same region from the perspective of an African American. Hodges also acknowledges his book's similarities to Clifton Taulbert's and Endesha Holland's memoirs. …