The Bootlegger's Other Daughter.

The Bootlegger's Other Daughter. By Mary Cimarolli. Sam Rayburn Series on Rural Life, no. 4. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2003. Pp. xiv, 170. $24.95, ISBN 1-58544-260-7.)

Mary Cimarolli's memoir of growing up in northeast Texas could be called "farm life noir." While she describes many activities typical of the 1930s and 1940s, such as hog killing and dewberry picking, Cimarolli recalls most vividly a life shadowed by tension and pain.

As the title indicates, one of the major difficulties in Cimarolli's youth was her father's constant skirting of the law. While he farmed, he also bought liquor and illegally brought it back to Hopkins County for sale. The father's activities humiliated his young daughter, who craved normalcy, and tested the limits of the sheriff's tolerance. Rural men defied the law.

Cimarolli forthrightly details the tension and shame occasioned by sex. The women in the family were mortified by the presence of her father's breeding jack. An encounter with a cousin under the porch at age six caused emotional pain for years. A groping by a stranger on the bus to Houston caused the adolescent girl to bind her breasts and deny her blossoming sexuality. Rural girls were exposed to negative sexual events and attitudes.

There was plenty of bad behavior to go around. Cimarolli's brother taunted her mercilessly about any and everything, compounding her grief and guilt when he was killed in a drunken traffic accident. Daily cruelties, like a classmate's theft of Cimarolli's banana (a special treat), caused a thousand small cuts. Rural people could be unkind to one another.

A current of suspicion--the rumor that Cimarolli's maternal grandmother had either drowned herself or been murdered, for example, or her mother's guilty belief that she had smothered her first-born child, who likely died of SIDS--runs through the memoir. A neighbor actually murdered his wife, leaving the tiny town of Seymore adrift in gossip and regrets. Rural people committed crimes and imagined the worst of each other and themselves.

Finally, Cimarolli describes the tension of being a rural child in an increasingly urbanized world. She attended the large high school in the county seat, always feeling isolated and humiliated. Her rural roots caused her grief when, for example, lack of transportation forced her to miss the school newspaper's afternoon staff meetings as well as football games. The narrative concludes with Cimarolli's arrival at the Texas State College for Women in 1948, where she found friendship and acceptance.

Cimarolli recounts these events with a surprisingly flat affect, matter-of-factly cataloging fears and transgressions. The memoir documents some interesting aspects of rural life, such as the pleasures of store-bought goods and the beginning of commercial dairy farming in northeast Texas. Because the memoir is intensely focused on one young woman's experience, readers will have to make their own interpretations. But Cimarolli's memoir provides a notable antidote to sentimentality about the idyllic nature of rural life.

Baylor University

REBECCA SHARPLESS