Memories of Simpler Times : Books: ‘Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored’ vividly yet gently recalls a childhood among an extended black Southern family in the pre-civil rights era of the 1950s.

Growing up in Glen Allan Miss., in the 1950s, Clifton Taulbert’s heroes lived in his neighborhood.

Poppa (his great-grandfather) shielded him from the harshness of segregation, Uncle Cleve encouraged his entrepreneurial instincts, Ma Ponk (his great aunt) worked with him nightly to complete his homework, and Mrs. Knight--one of a handful of local whites willing to break through racial barriers--fed him at her table.

Taulbert celebrates this extended family in “Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored,” a tribute to the last decade of Southern black life before the civil rights movement.

“I would never want to return to forced segregation,” he writes, “but I also have a deeply felt sense that important values were conveyed to me in my colored childhood, values we are in danger of losing in our integrated world. As a child, I was not only protected, but also nourished, encouraged, taught and loved by people who, with no land, little money and few other resources, displayed the strength of a love which knew no measure.

” . . . In our desire as black Americans to put segregation behind us, we have put ourselves in danger of forgetting our past--the good with the bad. I believe that to forget our colored past is to forget ourselves, who we are and what we’ve come from.”

His slim volume has gone through five printings--almost 25,000 copies--and in a year has become one of the bestsellers in the history of small Council Oak Books in Tulsa, Okla., according to publisher Paulette Millicap. After selling well in Chicago, Atlanta and Washington, it is scheduled to arrive in Los Angeles bookstores this month.

“There is very little about a segregated America that bears nostalgia,” a New York Times reviewer wrote, “and some readers may not be charmed by Mr. Taulbert’s portrait; yet he has evoked such loving memories of Glen Allan and its residents that readers will come away . . . at least a little sorry that they didn’t grow up there, too.”

Taulbert writes fondly of Poppa holding his hand tightly in Greenville, a town 30 miles north of Glen Allan. The old man would pull him out of the way as whites passed on the sidewalk and then would buy the little boy frozen custard ice cream and hot French bread so that he would not think about the slight.

He recalls teachers in the “separate but equal” school making him write countless essays on Dr. George Washington Carver, Mary McLeod Bethune, Marian Anderson and Jackie Robinson.

And he remembers Ma Ponk taking him to a clandestine night-time church meeting where parishioners sent a deacon to a national NAACP convention to voice concern over equal rights.

Visiting Los Angeles recently, Taulbert said lessons from family and friends prepared him to make his way in the world when he left Glen Allan in 1963. He was 17.

“I couldn’t forget the advice I’d heard over and over from Uncle Cleve and Mrs. Knight and others about getting an education and bettering myself,” he writes. “. . . Most of all, the hopes of my mother, the gentle wisdom of Poppa and the strength and determination of Ma Ponk would remain a part of me.”

He attended night school for eight years to earn his bachelor’s degree in sociology and history at Oral Roberts University, and graduated from the Southwest Graduate School of Banking at Southern Methodist University.

Today his Tulsa marketing and consulting firm is called the Freemount Corp. after a plantation owned by his ancestors. Taulbert and his wife, Barbara, live in a middle-class Tulsa neighborhood with their children, Marshall Danzy, 9, and Anne Kathryn, 2.

Taulbert began writing his book 20 years ago when a roommate in the Air Force asked about his youth. He continued working on the tales, with one four-year hiatus, and suffered “tons of rejections” until he found a publisher in 1988.

“I had always wanted to be a writer,” he said. “It was easy for me to write the stories of my family because I had written before. But I was never quite sure when it would happen or if I had the guts to follow my heart.”

The result seems to strike responsive chords among blacks and whites alike.

Blanche Richardson, manager of Marcus Books in Oakland, has noticed that customers return to buy three or more copies. “They see family history,” Richardson said. “They are sharing it with family and friends.”

Laverne Whatley, manager of the First World Book Store in Atlanta, said that the volume’s appeal is “nostalgia” and that buyers “are not usually from Atlanta. They are from small towns.”

Taulbert said he has collected sacks of mail about the book, half of it from whites.

“I received a handwritten letter from an executive at AT & T,” he said. “He had paralleled his relatives in the rural South to names of people in the book and he said, ‘Thank you for reminding of my rural roots.’ ”

National Public Radio featured the complete volume on the air, and Taulbert was one of only 12 authors chosen to address the 1990 American Bookseller’s Assn. convention in Las Vegas earlier this year.

“I think the book is popular across cultures because it contains a sense of family values, resilience and pulling together in difficult times,” Taulbert said. “Those are human characteristics.”

Taulbert’s tales of family may receive a wider audience in the future. His publisher has contracted with him to turn his book into a series of illustrated children’s stories. And during his Los Angeles visit he talked to movie and Broadway producers. He is also writing a sequel about his life after he left Mississippi.

Nowhere were his stories more appreciated than in Mississippi. He returned to Greenville for a bookstore reception in July, 1989, after the book was published.

“I do not think anything will be as moving and rewarding as that,” he said.

“In that crowd there were people who were part and parcel of the segregation system. There were 80-year-olds who were plantation owners. There were black doctors, black maids, guys who had just gotten off their tractors. A microcosm of all Mississippi was there at one place at one time to share our story.

“Historically, I would have spoken to an all-black or all-white audiences. But at this meeting we stood in line together and ate from the same crystal and drank from the same strawberry punch bowl and ate the same pound cake.

“For that small amount of time the book gave us reason to be proud of the fact that we were Southerners. Even in our most difficult time of getting along as people, we were able to forge the concept of family.

“There is no question that the Mississippi of my youth and the Mississippi of today are different places. And I realize that there are still a lot of things that have to change throughout the country generally and in Mississippi particularly. But for the most part the segregated, antebellum South I knew as a child was not present that Saturday at all.”

Nonetheless, Taulbert thinks his children will suffer from the demise of the extended family system he knew.

“I wish my aunts and uncles and people from that small community were still alive,” he said. “My children may be more privileged, but there is no way I can ever give them what was given to me as a kid because the whole structure is changed.