The Mama Chronicles: A Memoir

Winner of the 2022 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Life Writing

Growing up in the Delta town of Yazoo City, Mississippi, Teresa Nicholas believed that she and her country-born and -bred mother weren't close. She knew little of her mother's early life as a sharecropper during the Great Depression, but whenever she brought up the subject, her taciturn mother would snap, "You ask too many questions, young'un."

Nicholas left Mississippi to attend college, then settled in Ne...