An avid reader, she devoured book after book. In addition to the oral stories, books played an important role in Taylor ’s life from an early age. From my father the storyteller I learned to respect the past, to respect my own heritage and myself. In the author ’s note to Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, Taylor acknowledged her debt to this oral history and to her father in particular, “By the fireside in our northern home or in the South where I was born, I learned a history not then written in books but one passed from generation to generation on the steps of moonlit porches and beside dying fires in one-room houses, a history of great-grandparents and of slavery and of the days following slavery of those who lived still not free, yet who would not let their spirits be enslaved. Many of these stories would later play an important role in her novels.
Taylor vividly stored in her memory the tales she heard at family gatherings. Her neighborhood, with its caf é and movie theater, provided plenty of entertainment, and the Taylor family enjoyed several other forms of recreation, as well, such as storytelling. Taylor enjoyed being surrounded by so many family members, who gave her attention when her parents were busy. This house soon became home to aunts, uncles, and cousins, who eventually moved away from Mississippi in search of a better life. Upon arriving in Toledo, Ohio, the Taylors stayed with friends until they earned enough money to buy a large duplex on a busy commercial street. Delois, as her family called Mildred, was only four months old when they, like thousands of other southern African American families, boarded a segregated train bound for the North. Yet Taylor ’s parents, Wilbert and Deletha, wanted their daughters to grow up in a less racist society. His large extended family thrived despite the racism they encountered. Their paternal great-grandfather, the son of a white Alabama plantation owner and a slave woman, had become a successful farmer in Mississippi. Taylor was born at home on Septemin Jackson, Mississippi, where she joined her older sister Wilma. In doing so, her fiction defied the “political correctness ” of the 1990s. Since 1977, Taylor ’s fiction continued to portray the effects of racism counterbalanced with courage and love.
In 1977, Taylor won the Newbery Medal, the most prestigious award in children ’s literature, for her historical novel Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. Most of her works, which are based on her own family history, revolve around the close-knit Logan family, an African American family that rises above the indignities of racism through courage and love. Mildred Delois Taylor is a critically acclaimed author of children ’s novels.
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