The Seventeenth Child

by Dorothy Marie Rice and
Lucille Mabel Walthall Payne

"A true discovery—a book so utterly without and beyond artifice that it’s hard to review." — Los Angeles Times (1/17/99)

"Collaborating with her daughter, Payne reminisces about growing up in a large family of Virginia sharecroppers during the Great Depression—or, as she calls, them, ‘Hoover Times.’ She remembers what a child would remember: wrapping hair with saved pieces of string; tucking her dress into her panties to keep it clean before sliding down a hill; believing that babies came from tree stumps; suspecting that a neighbor who wore a wig was a witch because she could take her hair off; never questioning segregation in general, but resentful that white children rode a bus to school. Her theme is making the best of things in hard times. . . . Illustrated with a family tree and over a dozen black-and-white photographs." — Kirkus Reviews (10/15/98)

"Told in a style reminiscent of a journal [which] causes the narrative to ow smoothly, just as daily lives move from one event to the next. . . . An eye-opening account of what it was like to grow up as an African-American child during [the Depression]." — School Library Journal (1/99)

"Lively with down-home incidents; the voice is warm, sometimes funny, and never self-pitying; the past assumes an immediacy that will convey far more than the textbook history imposed on most students." — Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books (2/99)

About the Authors

Lucille Payne’s recollections have been edited by her daughter, Dorothy Rice, who is also the co-author of Pennies to Dollars. Ms. Payne is now retired; Ms. Rice is a teacher of gifted and talented students in the Richmond, Virginia schools.


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