Leaving Pipe Shop: Memories of Kin.

Deborah McDowell. Leaving Pipe Shop: Memories of Kin. New York: Scribner, 1997. 285 pp. $23.00.

Thomas Wolfe said, "You can't go home again." In her memoir Leaving Pipe Shop: Memories of Kin, Deborah McDowell, one of the country's leading scholars and critics of African-American literature and University of Virginia professor of English, shows that you can go home again, if you're willing to pay the price.

McDowell figured that she had paid the price by growing up in segregated Bessemer, Alabama, during the pre-Civil Rights Movement days of the 1950s and '60s, when she and her family were denied the most basic of human rights. Her father, Wiley McDowell, Sr., like most men of his generation, toiled as a laborer for slavish wages at the local steel mill, the U.S. Pipe and Foundry, which gave the community its name--Pipe Shop. When she escaped to attend college at Tuskegee University, and later at Purdue University for graduate school, she had "vowed never to come back, except for brief visits to see my loved ones." But in 1994 her Aunt Estella, "Auntee," summoned her home to investigate a settlement involving asbestos poisoning in the foundry and to re-examine the cause of her father's death twenty years earlier.

Born at a time when the sinister sword of segregation knifed the dreams and dignity out of too many Black folks, McDowell's father, a brilliant wordsmith, bequeathed to his daughter the gift of language. His dreams never sprouted roots at the U.S. Pipe Foundry for the more than thirty of his too-short-lived years. While rummaging through old photos and papers McDowell learned that her father had gone from earning 75 cents an hour to $4 an hour when he died in 1974 at age 51. Her shock and rage served as a catalyst and forced her to reflect on her past and go home again.

Although the book begins with memories of her father, the early part of McDowell's life was also shaped by strong, sharp-tongued, smart Black women. Her paternal grandmother, "Mother," who trained as a "private duty" nurse, introduced McDowell to the world of "daydreams inspired by oval bars of French-milled soap, crystal doorknobs, a silver handheld mirror with matching comb and brush, and a vibrant blue bottle of rosewater that sat serenely in the window." Like Dorothy West's protagonist Cleo Judson in The Living is Easy and Ann Petry's Abbie Crunch from The Narrows, "Mother," if necessary, could be hard as steel, "determined that if the good Lord blessed me with breath in my body, one day I would have as many pork chops as I pleased."

There is also her Mama, who didn't bite her tongue while dishing out fashion advice to the women of Pipe Shop and whose sewing she "took in" from a corner of her parents' bedroom, often telling the ladies why the latest fashion wasn't becoming on them. An example was the "day she told Miss Ezell that she shouldn't wear a sleeveless dress to Pokie's wedding, even though it was planned for the middle of July in Alabama":

Miss Ezell protested: "Look at Baby Jean; her arms ain't covered."

Mama lost no time in quipping, "That's right, but look at your arms, then look at Baby Jean's. She ain't got chick or child. You got eight, and nothing will ruin a woman's arms for sleeveless dresses like having eight children. Now look here, Ezell, this is your oldest child and your only daughter, so when the usher walks you down the aisle, you better not have your arms wiggling and jiggling all over the place like Jell-O."

And finally, there is Auntee, who was McDowell's oldest living relative during the writing of this book, her father's only sister. Often plagued by "man trouble," like many of the women of Pipe Shop, she warned: "'Don't never let no man see you low, 'cause then he'll sho' nuff try to walk all over you, and sometimes, you can't get up from it.'" When McDowell asked Auntee about Mr. Lige, the one-time love of Auntee's life, she responded, "'He was at Fred's funeral. You probably didn't recognize him 'cause he was looking so old--older than dirt or leastways like he might have been one of the folks walking behind Jesus on the road to Calvary.'"

This memoir is more than a compelling social history of the South at the dawn of the Civil Rights Movement. With vivid road signs and stirring language Deborah McDowell has transformed her daddy's word wisdom and her mother's aesthetic consciousness into a stunning and significant American story--one that we've been deprived of far too long.