THE HOUSES OF CLEBURNE COUNTY

The author recounts a childhood spent among farming communities during the Depression and World War II.

In 1934, Moore was born on his family’s farm, known as the Jackson Place, in Cleburne County, Arkansas. In his debut, Moore chronicles his family history in the area through the eight houses the family inhabited before they moved west to California. The memoir paints a nostalgic but realistic view of the author’s childhood, charting the highs and lows and providing a window into life in rural Arkansas in the 1930s and ’40s. Moore recalls the one-room schoolhouse where he began his education, bringing in the sorghum harvest, the installation of electricity, and climbing hickory trees with his friends, but perhaps the most vivid memory was the dramatic arrival of the family’s first car. Walking home from school, Moore found his father stuck in the mud on the main road in a green sedan and helped liberate both from the mire. Eventually, the new car arrived home, pulled by the Moores’ mule, Amos. The sedan was a point of pride for the patriarch: “We’re lucky to have such a fine car in this wartime world.” The book, full of nostalgia, anecdotes, and rich, historical detail (such as the Rural Electrification Agency and the arrival of appliances that seemed almost magical), meanders through the author’s early years, although the book sometimes jumps disorientingly from one event to another. Still, in his patchwork narrative of a life in Arkansas, Moore evocatively portrays how people survived and thrived in times of extraordinary change.

A compelling account of the simple joys of a rural childhood.