Pumping Sunshine: A Memoir of My Rural Childhood

by Susie H. Baxter

”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.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction

417 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 12, 2017

Reviews

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

A memoir of simpler times as far as materialistic things go. But a much harder lifestyle as far as survival goes. Her grandparents were her lifeline to get through childhood. There was a big divide between city kids/adults and rural kids/adults. I doubted her memories of the age of 2 or 3. Also at times it was really slowed down by to many details that were unnecessary. Overall a enjoyable book of a simpler and yet harder time in history.

[Amanda Adams]

Won this book on a Goodreads Giveaway and I can't wait to start reading it. Looking forward to this read --will update upon completion.

[Elizabeth McCulloch · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a vivid, warm-hearted memoir of life in rural Florida in the 1950's. It was a hardscrabble life on a small north Florida farm, subject to spring floods from the river. Building their first outhouse was a major event, and the fact that it had a deep hole underneath a source of pride. I'm always fascinated by our foremothers' capacity for hard drudgery; as soon as I read the account of laundry day I was hooked. Baxter's two older sisters picked on her mercilessly, and she was relentlessly shamed for her bedwetting, but the sense of family love and fun fills the book. The chapters are episodic, and it's perfect for dipping in and out of, like a book of short stories.