Summer Snow: Reflections From a Black Daughter of the South.

by Trudier Harris Beacon Press, March 2003 $24.00, ISBN 0-807-07254-0

In literary circles, Trudier Harris is best known as a scholar, critic and a coeditor of the Oxford Companion to African American Literature. These impressive credentials may soon be overshadowed by Harris the memoirist or essayist. Picking cotton, sitting on front porches, fishing and dread locks are a few themes she explores in a morphed memoir-essay style. Harris thoughtfully weaves patches of personal history with discourses on topics so fundamental to her growth as a young woman coming of age in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Her reflections will get repeated quiet nods and "un-huhs" from those of us who spent our early years in the South.

Even if you know nothing about chopping cotton, gutting a hog, or baiting a hook with squiring worms, you will be constantly amused by Harris's descriptive language, her way of drawing you into a scene and making you feel the sometime prickly cotton, hear the squeal of a dying hog, or flinch as a hot comb untangles a dump of nappy hair.

Here's some of the vivid detail she uses to invoke a slaughter: "As soon as the hogs were shot or knocked in the head, hung upside down and scalded, my uncle and other men went to work scraping the hair from them. Then Uncle Dexter stepped in to do his knife work. He would make one long incision--the length of the carcass--so that the entrails could be removed. Then he proceeded with the delicate cutting and slicing that reduced whole hogs to the valued pieces that would be salted for winter eating." Something to ponder as you devour that next helping of chitlins, huh?

A collage of Harris's imagination would include a weather-beaten shack in the middle of a cotton field with a little black girl sitting on a front porch getting her hair fried with a red hot straightening comb. But she does more than depict down-home scenes; she finds lessons in these bucolic moments, and each of the items, particularly cotton, become a metaphor, a touchstone, "an ever-ready reference point to delineate the distinctions between then and now, between mind-numbing labor and the possibility of moving to a different level of existence."

As Harris moves from a naive country lass to an esteemed university professor, her way is marked with slights and indignities, both from racist whites and loving blacks. On several occasions she recalls the challenges she faced acquiring the status borne of hard discipline and vigilant parents and teachers, as well as the expectations of family members and their demands, given her enormous success. Because she had reached a pinnacle of achievement that was not matched in the family, her siblings looked to her when money was needed to retire a debt, to sponsor an event.

Whether dealing with overweening relatives or indifferent colleagues, who "dis" her privately and patronize her publicly, Harris maintains a calm, a formula for managing madness that seems akin to that Biblical expression "to whom much is given, much is required." No matter the situation, she tends to keep a calmness that could only be the product of someone who knew intimately a childhood of unflushable toilets, frozen water pipes, tin tubs, and a brood of brothers and sisters vying for attention.

Or Harris's settled, ruminative poise may come from her almost total absorption of African American literature that she uses throughout the book to illustrate a point or to support a position. While she rarely cites Zora Neale Hurston, it is this writer more than any other that comes to mind, especially when Harris dips into an endless reservoir of folklore. These are also opportunities for her to exhibit her grasp of literature, and nowhere is it more tellingly displayed than her brief remarks on Alice Walker's novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland.

Among African Americans there is a growing trend to venture back to their southern roots to vacation or to retire. If you don't possess the means to do neither, Summer Snow provides a cheaper and a far more informative way to travel. A trip along Harris's imaginative byways will get you there with laughter and insight.