480 CODORUS STREET

A woman recounts stories of her hardscrabble coming-of-age in this debut memoir.

Kearse-Stockton was born in 1949, the second of seven children, to a working-class Black couple in York, Pennsylvania. The family home was on the eponymous Codorus Street, where they lived beside other Black families. “These families comprised the Codorus Street Bubble,” writes the author of the segregated neighborhood. “We had block parties and parents had house parties; there were several other bubbles where Negroes lived….Many of the areas were substandard housing. Parents worked together and children played together.” Her father was a long-haul truck driver and was gone for days at a time. When he was home, according to Kearse-Stockton, he dispensed violent beatings to the author, her siblings, and her mother, Dot. Eventually, Dot moved the children away from Codorus Street and her husband’s brutality, but unfortunately, that would not mark the end of violence in Kearse-Stockton’s life. She had three children by the age of 19, at which point her husband, Joe, was murdered in front of her and her kids by a neighbor who accused him of giving his wife gonorrhea. As a young, single mother, the author found herself figuring out how to navigate the world in much the same way that her mother had before her. Kearse-Stockton’s prose is conversational and often funny, as here where she describes her mother’s forcing her sister to help her with one of the family’s normal meals, groundhog: “One day Dot told Mary it was her turn to hold the groundhog’s foot so she could skin and gut it. Mary cried and begged, ‘Please Dot, and do not make me hold the groundhog’s foot.’ The rest of us would be laughing our butts off….Dot told her she was always the first one to want seconds when she made baked groundhog.” The book comprises anecdotes from the author’s childhood and early adulthood, some sweet and some disturbing, with little connective tissue other than a shared cast of characters. The memoir will likely be of most interest to members of her own family and her circle of friends, though readers who wish to know more about York’s Black community in the ’50s and ’60s will find this a valuable history.

An engaging, if slightly shapeless, autobiography.