Up Home

From the daughter of sharecroppers who became the first African American president of an Ivy League university comes an inspiring, indelible memoir about the people and places who made her remarkable life possible--and the power of education and books in a young person's life

I was born at a crossroads: a crossroads in history, a crossroads in culture, and a geographical crossroads in North Houston County in East Texas.

Ruth Simmons has led an extraordinary life. The former president of Smith College and Brown University, and now the outgoing president of Prairie View A&M, Texas's oldest HBCU, she has inspired generations of students. Born in 1945, Simmons grew up in the small town of Grapeland, Texas, the twelfth child of sharecroppers. Her first home had no water or electricity, and some of her earliest memories are of the cotton field. Yet despite this--in fact, because of it--Ruth would go on to become one of America's preeminent educators.

In Up Home, her memoir and origin story, Ruth takes us back to Grapeland and the family and community that had little economically but endless supplies of joy and love. We meet her ingenious mother who learned to make supper with a mostly empty pantry, and her father who refused to let the crushing realities of racial and economic injustice squelch the dreams of his youngest daughter. We meet the doting brothers and sisters and the attentive teachers who would welcome Ruth into the classroom every morning. A book about Black girlhood, Up Home shows how the specifics of time and place shape who we become in unexpected ways.

Moving from the farmland of East Texas to Houston's Fifth Ward to New Orleans at the dawn of the civil rights movement, Up Home is the uplifting story of a girl whose intellect, grace, and curiosity would lead her to make history. Like Ruth herself, this book is full of understatement, optimism, and a firm belief in the ideals of America.