FROM THE MISSISSIPPI DELTA.<i> By Endesha Ida Mae Holland</i> .<i> Simon & Schuster: 318 pp., $23</i>

The Mississippi Delta has produced not only cotton and catfish but also civil rights stories of stunning power. That this land of unending flatness and unrelenting poverty has yielded so many people who stood tall against violence and victimization--people like Aaron Henry and Fannie Lou Hamer--has long been known. Now we are being blessed with more books by and about the foot soldiers of the revolution they led.

Scholars paved the way in recent years. John Dittmer’s “Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi” and Charles M. Payne’s “I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle” concentrate on the grass-roots organizing that was the hallmark of the Mississippi civil rights movement. In that deepest of Deep South states, it was the people who often led the preachers into the streets and into the voter registrars’ offices, not the other way around.

When writers, though, tell the story of a family and how it met the movement, they vividly bring home what people were up against. We see the raggedy school books that black children used in segregated schools, and we feel the misguided hatred directed at them when they chose equality. Two years ago, we welcomed Constance Curry’s “Silver Rights,” the inspiring story of the Carter family’s fight for decent education in the little delta town of Drew. And now we have a magnetic memoir, “From the Mississippi Delta,” by Endesha Ida Mae Holland. That is Dr. Holland, most recently a professor at USC. Seeing the designation “Dr.” before her name on the top of the pages as we read about her harsh coming of age in Greenwood, Miss., in the 1950s is a constant reminder that she did eventually achieve her dream to get out of the delta. But, my God, what she experienced before she did.

Raped at 11 by a white man whose granddaughter she was baby-sitting, Holland eventually turned tricks for a living--$10 for white men, $5 for black men. Despite her prowess at recitation (her account of saving the day by remembering all of “Casey at the Bat” when white school officials visited Stone Street Elementary is a gem), she was thrown out of school. She went to the workhouse twice, first for shoplifting, later for decking “the other woman.” And she “got bigged”--that is, she was pregnant without being married--in her late teens, and her Mama, a midwife, delivered her son Cedric at home.

It is clear that Mama instilled the power of dreams in her youngest child. “You gots t’ grate dat ol’ bull by de horns ‘f’n you gwine be Somebody,” she would tell her. Mama had a gift for catching babies and another for what Holland calls “her playlike.” Mama was a born actress, playing out her roles in the shotgun house where her young daughter was often her only audience. Ida Mae caught the gift: not only reciting in school and trying to run away to join the carnival (another rollicking scene) but also practicing baton twirling in hopes of someday leading a parade. Holland later became a successful playwright and actually did lead parades--to the courthouse when the civil rights movement came to Greenwood.

“From the Mississippi Delta” is also the title of a play Holland wrote. Knowing that it’s been a drama as well as this memoir, readers who have trouble with the Mississippi dialect that Holland uses in relating conversations should say it out loud; here it’s OK to move your lips when you read.

I was writing the biography of Fannie Lou Hamer when I saw Holland’s play in the early 1990s. I was depressed for days. I could never capture the delta speech and essence as she had. Finally, I realized that was not my role; I hadn’t lived it. I was to report it. Holland and I were bound, in a fashion, through Mrs. Hamer (I use the honorific deliberately; everybody does). Holland writes that this “heavyset woman with a whole choir in her voice” reminded her of Mama; she was that kind of powerful.

When Mrs. Hamer was among a group of civil rights workers arrested at the Winona, Miss., bus station during a campaign of police intimidation, Holland volunteered to visit the jail where the women were being held. She saw how brutally they had been beaten. Mrs. Hamer took Holland’s hand and ran it over her bruised flesh. She urged Holland not to talk back to the leering policeman but to return to the office and tell the others. It was Holland’s report to her civil rights allies that later helped my report take on life.

When the civil rights workers first arrived in the delta, Holland and Mama had absolutely no plans to vote as the workers had asked black Greenwood to do. Mama warned her, “Don’cha git in wit’ dem fools. All dey gonna do is getta lotta folkeses kilt.” But the young men were strangers, and strangers had money, so Holland “wiggled and undulated” behind one all the way down McLauren Street to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee office. There, the man called for someone who could read and write to help sign up people for food. “If life had taught me nothing else,” she wrote, “it had taught me to recognize a cue to get onstage. I followed the stranger inside.”

Soon she was not only visiting the jailhouse, she was back in it herself, this time for disturbing the peace, parading without a permit: whatever the authorities could dream up to dampen black Mississippians’ courage. It didn’t work, and Holland belonged to the movement. “For the first time in my life I knew who I was.” Being treated with respect, she said, “was something wholly new for me.”

Slowly, as the young people continued their canvassing, even fearful people started to swell the crowds seeking their rights. We can feel their terror as police turned loose their snarling attack dog “who rampaged like Hannibal’s elephant” through the demonstrators, but they kept on going. After saying that Martin Luther King Jr. should never come to Greenwood when he did, Mama did an about-face and welcomed him to her front porch when he walked through the neighborhood. This gave Mama yet another story for her repertoire. Holland recalls, “People would come by our house later to see the hand that Dr. King held.”

Having seen Holland’s play, I began reading the book worried that, good as the drama was, there would be nothing new in the memoir. Indeed, the book does contain many of the same stories. But Holland spins out more tales in her memoir and is even more candid than in the play. She carries us into the lives that she and Mama and their neighbors lived, illustrating not only the obstacles the SNCC organizers faced but also the heroism they found and the ultimate price that some people paid.

Holland covers her early life in about 200 pages, the civil rights years in 100 and the last 30 years in less than 10 pages. I wished for more--more about how she got her doctorate at the University of Minnesota, more about how she translates her life into her work. I wished for the great line from her play recounting how, when she received her doctorate, she finally had a permit to parade. But perhaps that would be an anticlimax. No one with a sense of history and humanity--no one who has been as far down as Holland says she was, who has had helping hands as Holland has had, who had a Mama like hers--can read her book with dry eyes.