Pt Armstrong

With the publication of Looking Back and Dreaming Forward, Texas-born author PT Armstrong continues his exploration of the impact of race and racism upon individual American lives began with his first book, Sometimes It Was Beautiful, and the second, Frank and Mrs. Cahill. Looking Back and Dreaming Forward is composed of five personal memoir essays and one interview. Exactly as the book's title indicates, the author takes a hard uncompromising look at the pitfalls of racism in America with language which may be described as simple and down to earth. Of equal importance, if not greater, is the 91-year-old author's insistence that we have the ability to "make things better" and are well on our way to doing so.

SOMETIMES IT WAS BEAUTIFUL is a very different kind of book in the annals of work published in the American and African-African tradition. It is a true to life story told by PT Armstrong, a man whose incredible life began as the son of an impoverished sharecropper in Texas but who survived those slave-like beginnings to experience the kind of adventures that only a handful of people are still alive to talk about. Despite such life-threatening adversities as severe poverty and Jim Crow racism-when we worked as a "muleskinner"-- Armstrong tended to be "lucky in love." In SOMETIMES IT WAS BEAUTIFUL, he balances his report on the hardships of life for a young black man during the middle years of the twentieth century in America with tales of a young man constantly in search of love. Whether strongly erotic, humorous, or sad, the story of his quest for love is an unflinchingly honest one. The memoir employs dialect that is true to the era and place.