Pumping Sunshine: A Memoir of My Rural Childhood

”We live so far in the backwoods, we have to pump sunshine through hollow logs,” Susanette’s daddy says when asked where the Howell family lives. Their four-room cracker house sits on a farm near the Suwannee River. In this neck of the woods in the 1940s, kids run barefoot, use their pennies to buy bubblegum off the rolling store, and can’t wait for polecat on cane-grinding day and warm cracklins on hog-killing day. Susanette and her older sisters attend a three-room school for eight grades, when schools in the South are segregated and the Suwannee County school district bars country kids—white and black—from elementary schools in town. Young Susanette brings this time and place to life with humor and innocence as she struggles to understand her own embarrassing situations and overcome the apprehension she feels as her world begins to change.