“After saying our good-byes to friends and neighbors, we all got in the cars and headed up the hill and down the road toward a future in Ohio that we hoped would be brighter,” Otis Trotter writes in his affecting memoir, Keeping Heart: A Memoir of Family Struggle, Race, and Medicine. Organized around the life histories, medical struggles, and recollections of Trotter and his thirteen siblings, the story begins in 1914 with his parents, Joe William Trotter Sr. and Thelma Odell Foster Trotter, in rural Alabama. By telling his story alongside the experiences of his parents as well as his siblings, Otis reveals cohesion and tensions in twentieth-century African American family and community life in Alabama, West Virginia, and Ohio. This engaging chronicle illuminates the journeys not only of a black man born with heart disease in the southern Appalachian coalfields, but of his family and community. It fills an important gap in the literature on an underexamined aspect of American experience: the lives of blacks in rural Appalachia and in the nonurban endpoints of the Great Migration. Its emotional power is a testament to the importance of ordinary lives.

Keeping Heart: A Memoir of Family Struggle, Race, and Medicine (Race, Ethnicity and Gender in Appalachia)

Biographies & Memoirs

Trotter, Otis

Trotter Jr., Joe William

Community & Culture

Ohio University Press

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Books by Trotter, Otis

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Trotter, Otis. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Keeping Heart: A Memoir of Family Struggle, Race, and Medicine (Race, Ethnicity and Gender in Appalachia)

Keeping Heart: A Memoir of Family Struggle, Race, and Medicine (Race, Ethnicity and Gender in Appalachia)