The Broken Crab Bucket
$15.00
This book contains eleven short stories created from bits and pieces of incidents and circumstances observed in The Ville of the 1960s and the 1970s. The characters are fictional, the amalgamation of mannerisms and traits of people frequently encountered by the author during her high school years.
About the Book
This is the third of three books of short stories about The Ville to be published by author Jean McDaniels-Hughes. The trilogy of fiction stories is expected to be completed in 2020. The Ville of St. Lous, Missouri, once a prosperous entrepreneurial, educational, and professional community from 1910-1950, was racially segregated, a “boxed-in” community, as the result of restrictive housing agreements signed by whites who lived in neighborhoods that bordered and isolated the community. African Americans were prevented legally, sometimes dissuaded forcibly, from renting or buying property in those neighborhoods due to such agreements. The 1948 US Supreme Court ban on such agreements opened the flood gates for professional and middle-class Negroes to leave The Ville for a greater variety of housing, services and living opportunities outside its “perimeter.” Once it started in the late 1950s, the stream of “Black Flight” to other neighborhoods toward St. Louis County helped ravish the cohesiveness of Negro life and property in The Ville (and the Greater The Ville) as individuals, families, churches and businesses experienced growing dislocation, confusion, and the loss of control that led to destabilization for the next forty years. The Ville for many years has been called the "ghetto" and the slums. But for the past twenty years, since 2000, there are encouraging signs of revitalization.