In 1965, I visited Fayette County, Tennessee as a civil rights worker. I was a graduate student at the time, and I'd become increasingly uncomfortable with being a mere spectator to unfolding events.  Many young people were standing up for their belief in social change and I followed their lead. In April of 1965, at the very time that thousands of people were marching for voter rights in Selma, Alabama, I accompanied a group of students from the University of Chicago to spend two weeks living and working with African-Americans in Fayette County, a farming community just outside of Memphis, Tennessee.

      The African-American community of Fayette County was extraordinary. Back in 1959, they started one of the first voter registration drives in the rural South. Within a few months, local whites responded by threatening blacks with brutal reprisals: they refused to let registered black voters buy food, gas, and produce at any white-owned store in the county; and, in the case of 257 tenant farmers who'd registered to vote, white landowners kicked them off the land they'd lived on for generations. But evicted blacks refused to be intimidated. They set up a 'Tent City' on the land of two independent black farmers, and for over a year they endured cold, hunger, mud, and occasional gunshots before the federal government intervened to defend their voting rights.

      When I arrived in Fayette County, I spent a week living on the farm of Harpman and Minnie Jameson. Their small bungalow was a mile off the main highway, and to get there we had to walk over a muddy track that was inaccessible to cars. Farm life was completely new to me. There was no plumbing, not even an outhouse; I ate things I'd never imagined eating; I slept three in a bed with the Jamesons' son James as well as with another civil rights worker; and I tried, unsuccessfully, to milk a cow. During the two weeks our group spent in Fayette County we helped with the construction of a community center but, in truth, I was not much of a carpenter. What mattered most was that I formed a lifelong friendship with the Jamesons and other community leaders, and this opened up my life in many ways.

      A few years later, I took a leave of absence from my college teaching post in order to help my Fayette County friends tell the story of their grassroots movement. Many of the people most active in the movement had received no more than a mediocre eighth-grade education in segregated one-room schoolhouses. Even so, I told them that I didn't want to be a white outsider writing their history-- that they must become narrators of their own true-life stories. I returned to Tennessee with a tape recorder, and for several months I traveled the back roads of Fayette County interviewing the men and women who had stood up for their rights and put their lives on the line. My long days were exhausting and sometimes frustrating, but I have never lived more fully. I was deeply moved by the hospitality and trust I received. As I said before, the friendships that emerged from this work have remained with me till this day. After the interviews were completed, I spent many months transcribing my friends' spoken words and editing them into effective narrative form. It was difficult work, but it was also exhilarating-- the beginning of my writing career. It was not easy to find a publisher for Our Portion of Hell, but I was determined that the voices of my Fayette County friends become part of the historic record.

      After Our Portion of Hell was published, I realized that my work had just begun. Two more books (A Stranger in the House & All the Lonely People) followed, comprising a trilogy that looked at contemporary America from the bottom up.

      In 2023, the University of Mississippi Press reissued Our Portion of Hell.  This new edition includes additional photographs and a brief Afterword with my reflections on the making of the book, as well as thoughts about the lasting effects of Fayette County’s grassroots movement.  It is gratifying to know that after fifty years Our Portion of Hell is available to a new generation of readers.