"LEAVING PIPE SHOP": LOVING MEMOIR RECAPTURES A CORNER OF THE SOUTH THAT THE CIVIL-RIGHTS ERA CAMERAS MISSED CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va., Dec. 5 -- When Deborah E. McDowell was a book-loving, question-asking child growing up in a black, working-class community of rural-industrial Alabama in the 1950s and 60s, she made up her mind to get away as soon as she could. When she left to go to college in 1968, an era associated with segregationist Gov. George Wallace, she vowed not to return home except for dutiful family visits. By escaping the neighborhood called Pipe Shop, 12 miles from Birmingham, "I would permanently put the images, slights and restrictions of racial segregation far behind me, or so I naively thought," she recalls. Today, one of the country's leading scholars of African-American literature and culture, she has written a passionate book that both laments her loss of and celebrates this vibrant community of her youth, as well as the family and neighbors who held it together. The memoir, "Leaving Pipe Shop: Memories of Kin," just published by Scribner, also offers a significant social-history of African-American community life in an overlooked pocket of the Deep South, in an era before the victories of the civil rights movement had been widely established. McDowell, professor of English at the University of Virginia and an editor of the recently published "Norton Anthology of African-American Literature," was born and raised in the industrial crossroads, where most of the men worked for a barely liveable wage pouring molten iron to cast pipes that were sold all around the world. Her recounting of the time and place, novelistic in its sweep of colorful personalities and daily events, is full of loving memories of an extended family network and community who provided support and closeness: We passed long sultry July evenings in the age-old Southern way: rocking rhythmically back and forth on porches. Brandishing rolled-up sections of the Birmingham News, we swatted at mosquitoes buzzing round our ears. Grandma Edie called this interlude of evening 'first night,' the time before day's sunflower light turns slowly from tender gray to gunmetal to purple. While Reggie and the other boys shot marbles in the vanishing light and Daddy rested up for the night shift, the girls and women on our street crowded on someone's porch. Miss Hattie's was everybody's favorite... The book is also full of humor, partly because McDowell deliberately sets out to capture the sounds and rhythms of people talking, of people who loved to talk, who loved and toyed with language all the time. But the story is also permeated by sadness, separation and loss -- the loss of a community where people looked out for one another and danced at midnight to the blues. Especially, it is permeated by the loss of family members crucial to her development, as many of McDowell's kin, including her parents, died at relatively young ages. "This book is in part a series of elegies for all of it, for this place and for my people," says McDowell, who has taught at U.Va. since 1987. "It's a reconstruction of an era about which we think we know a good deal, much of it gleaned from the vast photographic archive compiled during the civil rights movement -- the images of police dogs and fire hoses turned loose on passive demonstrators. I wanted people to be reminded of all this, but also to see parts of this Southern community that the cameras missed. It is not nostalgic and not an effort to idealize the past. For all its remembrance of loss, it is ultimately a book about life." McDowell left her hometown to enroll in Tuskegee Institute and later received a graduate fellowship in literature to take her doctorate at Purdue University. For the next 20 years she kept her vow to go back as little as possible, partly because the place was associated with the pain of losing loved ones and of seeing the pervasive signs of a declining steel industry. After her parents died, her father's sister, her Aunt Estella, became her strongest link to her Alabama origins. It is "Auntee," as she is called, who speaks the first words of the narrative, which begins in 1994. "You got to come home." With those words McDowell is summoned home to investigate a settlement involving asbestos poisoning in the foundry and to re-examine the causes of her father's death twenty years before. McDowell was reluctant to get involved initially: her father had died of a stroke, the doctor who had treated him was dead, medical records were long gone; but she was drawn, despite herself, back into the past and her father's employment history at the pipe plant. As she probed deeper into the lives of people she had left behind, she eventually put aside a scholarly book-in progress about mourning and loss in African-American culture she was working on, realizing she herself had not mourned the catastrophic losses of her life. With the asbestos question a catalyst for her memoir, she combed through newspaper clippings, photos, letters, keepsakes and several volumes of personal journals to "repopulate" Pipe Shop. She brings forth a string of memories about the community, from home life and school life to religion to food to entertainment. The result is an unsentimentalized picture of the importance of neighborly life and also of suffering wrought by racial discrimination. In the end, poring through old records at the pipe plant, she comes across documents that reveal her father, over a 30-year period, had gone from making barely 75 cents an hour to hardly $4 an hour there when he died in 1974, a revelation that horrifies and enrages her. She leaves open the possibility that his working around asbestos may have contributed to her father's death at 51. McDowell had gradually become estranged from her father, somehow seeing him as a failure; "Leaving Pipe Shop" also becomes a reconciliation and a reconnection with him as she grasps clearly the circumstances under which he had worked to provide for the family and how much he had always insisted on her learning. "It is largely to him I owe my love of words," she says now. "What a brilliant man he was. He happened to have been born at the wrong time....I had never paused to reflect on the meaning of those relationships or to truly mourn their passing and the gaping holes they had left in me." McDowell keeps herself in the background of her writing as she meditates on small-town life. But there is always the sense of her parents and elders emphasizing learning and education as a key to a better life. "It was a generation that believed in education," she says. "I am completely impatient with the disregard for education today or the idea that it is just a means to a certificate and ticket to the good life. Our parents taught us that knowledge was the ultimate possession, your greatest possession." Two other elements she conveys in the book are a complexity and fluidity of class in black America, where a person may feel comfortable moving among various social stations and a single family may contain a variety of social conditions; and the sacred dimension in the black experience. "Religion was extremely important in the civil rights movement," McDowell points out. "There was always a sense of ethics and rightness, based in religion. We learned that a person alone in a community was not really alone, they were to be looked after. Today we are increasingly removed from the sacred. As a society we are increasingly alienated." McDowell has now returned to working on her larger study of violence, mourning and the symbolics of loss in African-American culture. In the meantime she is glad to have focused so closely on the life of one small but not forgotten community. She now understands, she says, "the wisdom of the old adage: 'you can't go home again, but neither can you leave it.'" ### December 4, 1996 To obtain review copies of "Leaving Pipe Shop" please contact Scribner at (212) 698-2332 or, preferably, by fax at (212) 632-4957. For interviews Deborah McDowell may be reached at (804) 924-6661 or 924-7105. Television reporters should call our TV News Office at (804) 924 7550. BOOK-SIGNING SCHEDULE FOR DEBORAH MCDOWELL Wednesday, Jan. 22 8:30 - 10 p.m. Williams Corner Bookstore signing/talk Charlottesville, VA Contact: Mike Williams (804) 977-4858 Saturday, Jan. 25 1 - 3 p.m. Vertigo Books signing Washington, DC Contact: Brigett Warren (202) 429-9272 Saturday, Feb. 1 12 - 2 p.m. Books-A-Million reading/signing Wildwood North 140 Wildwood Parkway Birmingham, AL 35209 Store Contact: Carol Mayes (205) 942-3737 Saturday, Feb. 8 12 - 2 p.m. Carytown Books signing Richmond, VA Contact: Kelly Justice (804) 359-4831