"Steeped in the lively cadences of black speech and the art of storytelling, Leaving Pipe Shop is one woman's reclamation of her family's history and ultimately her own. Clear-eyed, yet with feeling and delicacy, Deborah E. McDowell offers this moving and textured meditation on the ties of kin and the claims of memory.".

"More than a simple coming-of-age story, Leaving Pipe Shop is an evocation of growing up black in the South on the eve of the tumultuous sixties, a portrait of a culture in transition, of a Southern world in the throes of political and economic change. Here is the debut of a rich and powerful voice in American memoir."--BOOK JACKET.