The Seventh Child: A Lucky Life

Told with the irrepressible warmth and humor of a natural-born storyteller, The Seventh Child is the chronicle of a remarkable woman’s life, and of three generations of an African-American family.

The seventh of eight children, Freddie Mae Baxter was born in 1923 in rural South Carolina. When her father left the family, her mother had to raise the children alone, and Freddie Mae went to work–first picking cotton, then cooking for the white families in town. At seventeen, she decided to go up North in search of new horizons and a better life.

Now, in an astonishingly original voice, Freddie Mae shares with us the wisdom of her seventy-five years, and some vivid from her childhood in the South (“Two cents was money in those days. . .”) to her life in Harlem, where she played saxophone in an all-girl band (“We just jammed!”) and danced at all the hot clubs (“Anyplace that there was music, you could find me”).

Through the good times, bad times, and the enormous changes she’s lived through, Freddie Mae has remained steadfastly optimistic and emotionally generous. The Seventh Child will take its place alongside our strongest memoirs as an unforgettable American original. As Freddie Mae says, “Let me stay here; I’m doing all right just as I am.”