Growing Up on the Creek Bridge

by EARNEST "TEX" SIMS SR.


Formats

Softcover
£18.99
£9.90
Softcover
£9.90

Book Details

Language : English
Publication Date : 23/10/2006

Format : Softcover
Dimensions : 6x9
Page Count : 308
ISBN : 9781425934477

About the Book

The book, Growing Up On The Creek Bridge, is a true account based on life’s hardship and tragedy during the 1940s, ’50s and '60s. The story revolves around the life of my father, a black man’s struggle with poverty to provide for his family, a wife and eighteen kids, in Southern Arkansas.

 

The story is heartwarming, exciting, at times heartbreaking, telling of happy times and sad times, of a man and his faithful hunting dog, the atmosphere of cotton fields, the reflection of a family’s love for one another, and the will to survive in what we now call the “Good Ol’ Days”.

 

Even when my sisters, brothers, and I were old enough to help by picking and chopping cotton, times still were hard. Our electricity often stayed disconnected for lack of money to pay the bill and we had to fall back on the old coal-oil wick lamp to provide light.

 

We often stayed home from school for lack of lunch money or decent clothes to wear. And we always, always ran low on provisions or plum out, even with the commodities Uncle Sam supplied every month, and the wild game meat Daddy and his faithful hunting dog, Brownie, brought in from the woods. But, somehow, Daddy had always pulled us through...


About the Author

I was born Earnest Herman Sims in the Old Mel “Cow” Price house, a little three-roomed, tin-top shack in Casscoe, Arkansas on April 8, 1948, the first of eight boys born from 1948 to 1969, and the oldest brother to ten girls born from 1944 to 1967. Born to Willie Mac Sims and Rosa Lee Sims, my sisters, brothers, and I grew up chopping and picking cotton.

Unfortunately, I never attended college, or graduated high school. At thirteen, after only three days in the seventh grade, I dropped out of Immanuel High School to help my father, a sharecropper cotton farmer, support our growing family. Regretfully, I never went back.

I always wanted to write—to be a writer of stories—because printed words had always fascinated me. They still do.

It seemed natural that I write. At twelve years old, I sat down and wrote my very own book, a little short story about Tarzan, just something for my sisters and brothers to read. I was always scribbling words on paper, even if all I done was ball it up and throw it in the wastebasket.

I am 58, single, and currently living in Stuttgart, Arkansas—the Rice and Duck Capital of the World. I am the proud father of eleven children: Earnest Jr., La'Teasa, Tangula, Marcella, Freddie, Kenya, DeWayne, Deon, Deshun, Tanika and Florida. I am the proud grandfather of fifteen grandchildren. And on September 19, 2006, I became a great-grandfather to Anthony Tolliver, first grandchild of Tangula Rena Sims.