A Child is a Poem You Learn by Heart

South Carolina, 1940s. A farmer's daughter marries her father's hired hand and the two of them have Paulette, a child who will grow up on her own in the 1950s and 60s. In an era when divorce was rare, Paulette's mother, was married three times and struggled to care for her daughter, working at a drugstore by day and a bar by night. With little education and a difficult childhood herself, Paulette's mother had little knowledge about parenting. When the author was a toddler, her mother left her in the home of strangers for four years and removed her from that home, a stable environment, at age six. She brought Paulette into a world of poverty and dysfunction. During their travels from Virginia to Colorado and South Carolina, Paulette attended many different schools, including four different schools in first grade. At at six Paulette spent nights alone in their apartment leafing through her mother's True Confessions magazines and listening to 78 rpm records while dancing with her shadow. This is the true story of her mother's trial-and-error approach to parenting, her poor choices, and the ways they affected her daughter. When her mother married for the third time, security and a better life seemed to be within reach, but Paulette realized that her mother viewed her as an obstacle to happiness. When she was sixteen, she had never read a book cover to cover, but her tenth grade English teacher encouraged her with a few kind words. After reading Daphne du Maurier's novel, Frenchman's Creek, she could not get enough of reading. Another English teacher encouraged her to write and her history teacher encouraged her to think for herself and to speak her mind. Her powerful, honest, yet loving memoir in verse demonstrates the power of a teacher's words and their effect on a young life. The author lived a childhood of loneliness and emotional abuse until she found her voice and the road to her future as an influential, award-winning teacher. In this inspirational collection of expressive free verse, Whitehurst shares her coming of age story of perseverance, persistence, and forgiveness. This book is captivating, eliciting both tears and laughter, an outstanding Southern Memoir.