Ernest Gaines. 
 
The Dial Press: 1971. First printing. Hardcover in a jacket. Octavo. Chipping along the top of the jacket, darkening on the folds of the jacket, and tearing on the crown of the jacket's spine. Bumping on the crown of the spine of the book, and minor foxing on the top edge of the text block. There are 6 pages throughout the 244 page novel with a passage underlined in pen. 245 pages. Very good. 
 
Gaines, master fiction writer of the 70s, earned the praise of critics and the envy of novelists with a lyrical, fictional autobiography of a woman born into slavery, but who, after one hundred years of outlandish and outlawish life, "captures and saves the truth of all our lives," as Alice Walker put it. 
 
“If I ain’t nothing but trouble, you ain’t nothing but Nothing.”