No Quittin' Sense

By Ada Morehead Holland and C.C. White

Book Overview

This story, set in the Piney Woods country of East Texas, spans most of a century, from shortly after the close of the Civil War to the 1960's. It is the story of Charley White, who was born in the middle of those woods--in a decaying windowless log cabin a few years after his mother and father were freed from slavery. His childhood, lived in almost unbelievable poverty, was followed by financial stability achieved in middle age through years of struggle. And then, in order to obey God's will, he abandoned this secure life, and for forty years he waged a one-man war on poverty and intolerance.

Winner of the Carr P. Collins Award (best nonfiction book) of the Texas Institute of Letters, No Quittin' Sense presents the story of Rev. C. C. "Charley" White, whose life has inspired thousands of readers since the book was first published in 1969.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0292755082
• ISBN13: 9780292755086
• Release Date: February 1995
• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Length: 238 Pages
• Weight: 1.08 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Rev. C.C. White and Ada Morehead Holland, No Quittin' Sense

This is the autobiography of the Rev. C.C. White, a minister of the Church of God in Christ, and founder of God's Storehouse, a building filled with smoked hams, food, and clothing to be distributed to locals in need. Ada Holland, who had written articles on White for Ebony and Texas Magazine (see pp. x, 206, 213; incidentally, she donated most of the fees she received to God's Storehouse), provided him with tapes and a recorder, working the result "into a logical, readable form" (at p. xi). Although "done largely in his exact words," Holland notes that "[m]any good incidents had to be eliminated, and others had to be condensed" (at id.). After reading No Quittin' Sense, one can only hope that the tapes have been preserved. What White gives us, with Holland's assistance, is a first rate autobiography, showing what it was like to grow up black in East Texas at the turn of the century. His eye for the apt phrase is remarkable; Lucille, his first wife, tells him, "'You know, Charley, even the rocks look pretty,'" when they clear their land (at p. 107), while only someone with a heart of stone could fail to be moved by the description of her new kitchen furniture: Lucille was so proud of her new safe she could hardly leave it alone. She rearranged her things in it nearly every evening. Once, when she didn't know I was watching, she pushed her drawer in and out several times and didn't put anything in it or take anything out. Then she opened the doors and shut them a time or two, and run her hand over the smooth wood, just as gentle like. She never did know I seen her (at p. 111). Any description of black life at that place and time would be interesting; it is our good fortune that Rev. White is a master raconteur. We are given descriptions of a creek baptism (at pp. 3-4), hog butchering (at p. 24), laying out a corpse with a saucer of salt on its chest and silver dollars on its eyes (at p. 69), and of an extramarital affair at a schoolhouse (at pp. 100-01; Rev. White was the custodian at the time). We learn about "stick and cat" chimneys (at p. 28), using old hornets' nests for gun wadding (at pp. 51-52), and the Reverend can almost make you taste his mother's biscuits (see p. 66). The reader moves seamlessly from C.C. White's childhood, when he shows early signs of his vocation by baptizing sticks and burying Old Poke, his doll (at pp. 5, 11), through the building of his storehouse for tithes (at pp. 166-67), to race relations in Texas in the 1960's ("'They may beat a man half to death trying to make him confess something he never done, but they've always let him vote'"- at p. 212). This book offers a window into a world that has now largely disappeared. You don't have to be religious to enjoy No Quittin' Sense. Samuel Pyeatt Menefee