Jimmy Carter recreates the vanished world of his Depression-era Georgia boyhood, when the future president lived on a farm without electricity or running water among Black sharecroppers whose lives intertwined with his own. Carter writes with novelistic detail about plowing behind mules, fishing in Choctawhatchee Creek, and the rhythms of agricultural labor that governed everyone's existence. His closest childhood companions were Black children, and the memoir examines the painful hierarchies of segregation through a child's eyes that gradually become an adult's understanding. Carter's father, Earl, was a successful farmer and businessman who employed Black workers and extended credit to neighbors of both races; his mother, Lillian, was a nurse whose care crossed racial lines in defiance of local custom. The book depicts a world where intimacy and injustice coexisted, where white and Black children played together but could not attend the same schools or sit together in church. Carter does not romanticize or condemn; he renders with precision the texture of a place and time. The memoir illuminates how Carter's later commitments--to racial justice, to hands-on work, to habitat for humanity--grew from this soil. It's a portrait of the rural South that neither apologizes for nor celebrates what it was, but simply and powerfully describes it.