This is the story of a North Carolinian born in a log cabin on the Bob Emerson farm where his father was a sharecropper and did "public work." At the age of twenty-five, James established himself in a grocery business along a logging road in timber land not far from his birthplace. It is one of the most fascinating portrayals of a man "growin' up and comin' on" —an historical vignette of the recollections of a unique black man, respected and loved by people of both races.
Paperback, 1977, reprinted 2021, Chapel Hill Historical Society. 242 pages.