Rolling Down Black Stockings: A Passage Out of the Old Order Mennonite Religion

A rare memoir of growing up Old Order Mennonite

Rolling Down Black Stockings is a personal recollection of Esther Royer Ayers’s youth spent in a highly restrictive and confined religious community. Her story is as much a search for identity and a longing for a mother’s love as it is a tale about a totalitarian culture that led to her departure from the Old Order Mennonite religion.

This poignant story is told in three books: book 1 describes her youth in a farm community on the outskirts of C...