Book Review: Mama Makes Up Her Mind

Title: Mama Makes Up her Mind

Author: Bailey White

Date: 1993

Publisher: Addison-Wesley

ISBN: 0-201-63295-0

Length: 229 pages

Quote: "Tourists don't go there; they've got more sense."

Bailey White used to tell stories of small-town life in southern Georgia and northern Florida on NPR. Fifty-five of her stories are collected in this book. Though not as raucous as Lewis Grizzard or as raunchy as Jill Conner Browne, they're no less funny.

In the title story Mama makes up her mind that she wants to eat in an old-fashioned juke joint where her daughter would be afraid to go alone, then asks for the bathroom, announcing loudly, "My daughter wants to know." Mama also uses an old naval "spyglass" to watch birds, attracts rare red-cockaded woodpeckers, requests Benny Goodman from the radio station that plays classical music, proposes taking home the snake they've run over to cook "with a white sauce with dill and mustard," and fails to warn guests about the fold-down guest bed's tendency to fold itself up during the night. And this kind of eccentricity seems to run in the family.

The setting of this book is the traditional home of the trendy kind of rednecks. (It's often forgotten that at the turn of the twentieth century, during the union wars, some unionized laborers in the North who wore red bandanas also called themselves rednecks.) There are no rednecks in the book. Bailey White's social circle are educated, reasonably well-to-do, the kind of people everyone's grandmother would have called "nice"...and the purpose of Mama Makes Up Her Mind is to show that people like that can be just as funny as Jeff Foxworthy's rednecks.

Mama Makes Up Her Mind is a Fair Trade Book: when you buy it here, for $5 per book, $5 per package, plus $1 per online payment, we'll send 10% of the original total price or $1 to White or a charity of her choice. Four books of this size would fit into one $5 package. By a delightful coincidence, four books by Bailey White are showing up on Amazon, all guaranteed to be funny in a nice way, and if you order all four (for a total of $25, or $26 online) White or her charity will receive $4.