The Wildmons of Mississippi: A Story of Christian Dissent: "The Red Clay Hills of Tippah County"

This autobiography tells the story of the Wildmon family and their struggle to survive in rural Mississippi during the Great Depression and the years that followed. In this book, author Allen Wildmon, renders life on a hard-scrabble farm, the merciless betrayal of nature, the spare pleasures offered by a subsistence farm, and the triumph of character over circumstance that led the authors brother Don to found the American Family Association and challenge the hegemony of a pop culture that has changed America and not for the better.This narrative -- which begins in a cotton row in North Mississippi -- is characterized chiefly by its riveting details of life among people whose courage and simple faith are seldom encountered in the historic treatments of poor whites in the South. Wildmon exhibits total recall of an era that has passed into memory the sights, sounds, and smells of the past. He shares with Thomas Wolfe and William Faulkner the ability to remember the precise color of a country drug store, the idiom of the town square, and the dress a sister wore 60 years ago. --Thomas H. LandessSouthern Literary Critic This book will appeal to nostalgia buffs, historians interested in primary sources, and those concerned with the collapse of taste and values in an age of radical change. It is by turns heart-wrenching, funny, and inspiring the story of one Mississippi family and every American family.