Distant Son: An Alabama Boyhood

By Norman McMillan

The absorbing story of a poor white boy struggling during the forties and fifties to define himself in a world of poverty and deprivation in Alabama.

Norman McMillan was the eighth of ten children. His forceful mother Lucille was greatly ambitious for her children, and his feckless father Albert never knew how to capitalize on his advantages. During much of young McMillan's first eighteen years, his family sharecropped, living in a series of rough, unpainted houses and struggling to claw out a meager living by truck farming.

Despite the deprivation the family faced, they seldom dwelled on their straitened circumstances. Lucille preached a strange sort of noblesse oblige based on ancestral pride. Because their riches of birth and ability were far greater than mere material possessions, Lucille taught her children to think of themselves as superior to many people who were better off economically. Any deprivation they experienced was temporary and would only serve to strengthen and toughen their character. It was, she assumed, their birthright to succeed and prevail. Meanwhile, Albert, whose family provided the illustrious ancestors held up as models, drank up his meager money, sold off his property, and, as the years passed, withdrew more and more from the world.

Both comical and moving, Distant Son tells the story of these parents and their children as well as their relatives and neighbors. It depicts with rich and lively detail a life that was largely fading in the boom years of the 1940s and 1950s, but a world in which many people still found themselves. Without self-pity, the memoir celebrates the human spirit and its triumphant power to transcend temporary circumstances.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 097119131X
• ISBN13: 9780971191310
• Release Date: February 2014
• Publisher: Cahaba Trace Commission
• Length: 269 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.5" x 9.5"
• Age Range: 14 years and up
• Grade Range: Grade 9 to Postsecondary

Customer Reviews

WONDERFUL WRITING ABOUT A YOUNG LIFE

This memoir is about the author's youthful life up 'til college time. He comes from a large family and makes it easy for the reader to keep track of everyone. His mother is the stable one (tho she has some strange ways, also) and his father an alcoholic, though he becomes more rational as he ages. Norman is now age 62 and he makes his life most interesting while a youngster in small Southern towns. A fast read, too.