Mildred D. Taylor
Biography
Short film of Mildred D. Taylor
Mildred Taylor was born in Jackson, Mississippi, on September 13th, 1943 to wilbert Taylor and Belle ethe Davis Taylor. Life in the racially segregated south was difficult and sometimes unpleasant for wilbert Taylor, so a few weeks after Taylor's birth, he boarded a train bound for Ohio hoping to establish a home in the north where his family would have opportunities that wouldn't be possible in Mississippi. Within a week he had found a factory job in Toledo and two months after that, when Taylor was three months old, he brought his family to the north, it wasn't long before many chilled members of Taylor's extended family followed her family to Ohio and for much of her childhood she was surrounded by ants, uncles, and cousins.
Even though he lived in the north, Taylor's father never stopped loving the south and the family that remained behind in Mississippi, and throughout Taylor's childhood he regularly took his wife and children to visit them. It was during those visits to Mississippi that Taylor learned about family history and storytelling, both of which would years later become essential to her writing career. The telling of family stories was a regular feature of Taylor, family gatherings. Family storytellers told about the struggles relatives and friends faced in a racist culture, stories that revealed triumph, pride, and tragedy. These stories inspired Taylor and she still has a vivid recollection of the storytelling sessions. I remember my grandparents house, the house my great grandfather had built at the turn of the century, and I remember the adults talking about the past, as they talked, I began to visualize all the family who had once known the land, and I felt as if I knew them, too.
Many of the stories told were humorous, some were tragic, but all told of the dignity and survival of the people living in a society that allowed them few rights and citizens and treated them as inferiors. Much hitch history was in those stories and I never tired of hearing them. They were stories about slavery and the days following slavery. There were stories about family and friends. All of Mildred detailers novels to date are based on stories from her own family, stories she learned at family gatherings throughout her life. The Logan family saga then is essentially family history for Taylor. The saga begins with Paul Edward Logan in the land, leaving his family in Georgia in the 1870s and eventually settling in Mississippi, where he buys the land that will become the homestead for all the future logans.
The last novel planned for the saga, Logan, is told from the point of view of a third generation Logan Cassie, the book will take the Logan family from their home in Mississippi to their new home in Ohio. Taylor is currently working on this novel the final episode in the Logan family saga. Mildred Taylor's books have won many awards and have blessed an enlightened readers everywhere.