Childtimes: A Three-Generation Memoir was published by Thomas Y. Crowell in 1979, with illustrations by Jerry Pinkney. Written collaboratively by Eloise Greenfield, her mother Lessie Jones Little, and drawing on stories from her grandmother Pattie Frances Ridley Jones, the book weaves together three childhoods: Pattie’s in rural North Carolina in the 1880s and 1890s, Lessie’s in small-town North Carolina in the 1910s and 1920s, and Eloise’s in Washington, D.C., in the 1930s and 1940s.
The three-generation structure gives the book an unusual depth — it is at once a family memoir, a social history of the Great Migration, and a meditation on the ways that childhood experience is shaped by race, economics, and historical circumstance. Each section is told in the voice of its subject: Pattie’s childhood of farming, church, and limited schooling; Lessie’s childhood marked by her father’s ambition and the family’s move north; Eloise’s childhood in the segregated but vibrant Black community of wartime Washington.
What unites the three narratives is the quality of attention to sensory detail — the taste of particular foods, the feel of particular fabrics, the sounds of particular streets — that makes each childhood vivid and specific. The book refuses to sentimentalize poverty or oppression, but it also refuses to reduce these childhoods to mere suffering: each woman remembers joy, play, love, and community alongside hardship. The result is a richer and more truthful account of Black American experience than any single narrative could provide.
Collecting Childtimes
First edition (Thomas Y. Crowell, New York, 1979): Hardcover with dust jacket, illustrations by Jerry Pinkney.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $30–$75
- Later printings: $5–$10