WATCHING OUR CROPS COME IN.<i> By Clifton Taulbert</i> .<i> Viking: 157 pp., $15.95</i>

Several years ago I found myself at a film festival in a large northern city in connection with the hoopla surrounding the film based on my book “Forrest Gump.” Not long before I was to go on stage to speak, a publicity man showed up and asked if I wasn’t from Mobile, Ala. When I said I was, he delightedly informed me that baseball legend Hank Aaron was also at the event. Since he, too, was from Mobile, would I like to meet him for the TV cameras? I said sure and was led into a room where Aaron was giving an interview. We were introduced, and after some polite on-camera conversation, reporters began asking us questions. At some point, in one of the dumbest displays of media-style journalism I can recall, a young reporter inquired of us, “Did you two know each other growing up?”

Aaron and I looked at each other in momentary bewildered embarrassment, then we both began to chuckle and shake our heads. Of course not, we both knew, because in the South of the late 1950s and early ‘60s and, for that matter, most of the rest of America, a white boy and a black boy might, except by some strange accident, have lived on separate planets in their mutual home town.

If this were the only message Clifton Taulbert had to convey in “Watching Our Crops Come In,” this incise and touching memoir would probably be unremarkable. But magically, it is not.

Taulbert, author of the previously applauded “When We Were Colored” and “The Last Train North,” continues in this short book his autobiographical reminiscences of growing up black and poor in a tiny town in the Mississippi Delta on the cusp of the civil rights movement of the early 1960s. His first two memoirs told the tale of growing up in the segregated South and subsequently moving to St. Louis in his late teens.

In this latest book, Taulbert continues his saga in 1967 as he enlists in the Air Force in hopes, by his admission, of avoiding the Army draft with its more significant chances of service in Vietnam. After basic training and after a stint at a remote air base in Maine, he manages to get himself assigned to a prestigious Air Force unit near Washington, D.C., that provided support for the president’s plane, Air Force One.

In the meantime, great changes were sweeping over the South of his boyhood, including his little hometown of Glen Allen, Miss. When Taulbert left Glen Allen a few years earlier, the place was legally segregated. “I had never been able to check out a book from the public library,” he writes. But with astonishing speed, the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the financial support of the federal government propelled the civil rights movement into action that began breaking down many racial barriers that had been in place for a century. New leaders among Taulbert’s peers, both “saints” and “sinners,” began to emerge, registering the black vote, integrating public institutions and “transforming the people of Glen Allen into a vital, single unit.”

When he returned home on leave, Taulbert was amazed at what he saw. “Although I had vague memories of a cotton field relationship between a teenage white boy, myself and another colored kid from the colony, what I was seeing now was altogether different. In broad daylight, I saw young white men sitting on empty soda cases talking with black men. They were laughing together. They were sharing their lives. And they didn’t seem to be afraid.”

After so many years of oppression and neglect, the blacks of Glen Allen were “making headway,” Taulbert writes. “They were getting grants, they were getting jobs. Citizens were voting for the very first time, and they had begun prepping the children for the future.” Among the programs that had a direct impact on Glen Allen and the Taulbert family was Head Start. For years, he writes, “Mama had returned to the fields and the kitchens of white cotton plantation owners to work as a maid. And, like scores of other American black women, she had resigned herself to that kind of life.” But now Taulbert’s mother was happily employed as the county administrator for Head Start.

Back on duty in Washington, Taulbert found himself pulled toward doing something for the civil rights cause. He finally got a job stuffing envelopes for presidential candidate Robert Kennedy and attended the Poor People’s march on Washington in March of 1968, but the demands of his Air Force job kept him busy and, as his enlistment ran out, he found himself being seriously courted by senior enlisted men to make the service a career. As we now know, he did not do this and--in events I suspect he will recount in a future book--he wound up as one of America’s outstanding black entrepreneurs.

What is striking about Taulbert’s memoirs is not that he gets to go on to become the head of General Motors or a movie star or president of the United States but that he can look back with gentle, rancor-free maturity on a life that began with little and with one hand tied behind his back, and he still can see himself luckier than many. For even in the midst of his poverty and degraded social position in the segregated South, he could write, “ . . . I realized that the home I knew as a child was more than the house Grandpa built, it was the love I felt while living in the house, a feeling that was transportable. It could be with me, even here, hundreds of miles away as my world changed and as I contemplated what was happening there.”

One of the criteria I’ve always found useful in evaluating a memoir, reminiscence, autobiography or whatever is whether after you’re through reading it, you’d like to actually meet the author, sit and talk with him awhile. I can categorically say that I would like to meet Taulbert and hope to do so some day. “Watching Our Crops Come In” is an eloquent and moving account of how a man comes to appreciate and understand his life and times and, aside from its obvious appeal to a general audience, ought to be required reading for young people, regardless of race or ethnic origin.