Oral history with Percy Brooks

              Oral history with Percy Brooks
F341.5 . M57 vol. 743, pt. 1
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Biography
Percy Brooks was born on November 15, 1911 in Noxubee County. He is the only son of Walter Walker and Lillian Brooks. The Brooks' daughter passed away at a very early age. The family worked as farmers on land that they owned, and Mr. Brooks, a lifetime resident of Noxubee County, continued the family tradition of farming until his retirement.
Mr. Brooks inherited the land from his grandfather on his mother's side. His grandfather worked extremely hard to own land after experiencing him and his mother being sold as slaves in Noxubee County, and having his brother separated from the family due to this slave auction. After his grandfather was freed during the Civil War, he sharecropped and rented land, and saved to buy eighty acres in 1909. Mr. Brooks' childhood centered around maintaining and valuing this proper alongside his grandfather. Although Mr. Brooks attended the Silvan Ridge School in Macon, he left school to farm the family plots as well as other people's land when it was harvest season. He also left home when he was older to finish his education in high school in Columbus, but he quit soon after starting to return home and resume work at the farm.
During the Depression, crops grown on the farm sustained the Brooks family even though money was scarce. Farming was also a source of income when Mr. Brooks held jobs at the cotton compress in Macon for twenty- five years, built and cleaned roads for the Works Progress Administration ( WPA) in the 1930' s, and worked for Delta Brick for ten years. At one point, when Mr. Brooks lost a part of his land according to a county regulation that said he had to plant more cotton on it or lose it, and he was not given a pension that he was initially promised at Delta Brick, Mr. Brooks relied more heavily on his land for income as a supplement to his social security. He retired from farming in 1962, and he advises that young people today should place more emphasis on owning property than they seem to do.
He and his wife Callie Harlen Brooks had nine children. One son is deceased. The other eight children, four boys and four girls, have all attended and graduated from college.
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