Allen remembers his family in this chapter, crediting his grandmother Rosa Bell Greene with life skills that enabled her to support her children after the death of her husband on her own. Allen focuses on Rosa Bell’s food-growing and cooking talents, as well as her “expert[ise] at make-do” (45). Allen’s mother learned everything she knew about food and making do from Rosa Bell, and Allen absorbed much of this knowledge as well.

The history of sharecropping was not a bright one for Allen’s family, especially as debt and infestations impacted the success of crops; Allen claims that “sharecropping often became slavery under a different name” (46), which is why his family fled north when the Great Depression hit. Then World War II began, and “[i]n the armed services, [his] mother’s brothers were suddenly earning $50 to $70 a month” (48), and after the war, they were unable to return to the poorly paid labor of cotton-picking.

Allen introduces his father, O.W. Allen, in this chapter, a man who “was good at reading things besides words” (49). O.W. and Willie Mae, Allen’s mother, met in “the same small African American community near Washington, D.