Leaving Pipe Shop
Subtitle: memories of kin
By: Deborah E. McDowell.
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 1996
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 285
Subjects: McDowell, Deborah E., 1951- -- Childhood and youth.; McDowell family.; African American women -- Alabama -- Bessemer -- Biography.; African Americans -- Alabama -- Bessemer -- Biography.; African Americans -- Alabama -- Bessemer -- Social life and customs.; Bessemer (Ala.) -- Biography.
Genres: Biography.
Description: Steeped in the lively cadences of black speech and the art of storytelling, Leaving Pipe Shop is one woman's reclamation of her family's history and ultimately her own. Clear-eyed, yet with feeling and delicacy, Deborah E. McDowell offers this moving and textured meditation on the ties of kin and the claims of memory.

More than a simple coming-of-age story, Leaving Pipe Shop is an evocation of growing up black in the South on the eve of the tumultuous sixties, a portrait of a culture in transition, of a Southern world in the throes of political and economic change. Here is the debut of a rich and powerful voice in American memoir.