Think about that quote for a minute. People treated her twin sister better simply because she had
lighter skin and hair that could be
combed. This, folks, is at the
beginning of the book. If that does
not give one insight into the
inspiration for her blistering brand
of Blues I do not know what
would.
In the book the reader is
given access to some of the most
personal and painful details of
Sheba’s life. Her mother had her
first child when she was 14 years
old. Her mother had been sexually
abused by a family friend. This
had a profound effect on Sheba as
she recalls when she wrote “At
times I went to hug her, and she
pulled away...” We also learn that
when Sheba’s mother was 18 she
seduced another woman’s
husband with the result being
Sheba and her twin sister. The
man never acknowledged that Sheba was his daughter.
Sheba’s childhood in Mississippi was one of abject poverty. She lived in a very small
house, before moving to a slightly larger one. The only problem was that this larger house was
only half of a house, as the other half had been torn down. Eventually, her family was able to
‘upgrade’ to a shotgun house which is so called because the house is very narrow and quite long.
Worse than the living conditions, however, was the lack of food. Sheba writes: “Food was
something we never had enough of. I remember many nights going to bed hungry.”
How can anyone read this and not feel for this little girl?
Of her time in Mississippi Sheba has this to say:
There is one thing that kept us going, and that was singing. We would start to sing, and it
seemed like everything just went away. The heat from that big yellow sun, the hunger
pangs, all of it just went away. This is where the soul of my music came from— those
cotton fields of Mississippi. I didn’t get it from school books, or from someone teaching
me; it came from within. Even when we were not in the fields singing, we were in church
or on the porch late evenings singing.
Sheba’s book not only gives insight into what it was like to grow up poor and black in the
Old South, but she also answers some fundamental questions about a style of music that changed
the world.
Sheba writes: