Palmetto Publishing Releases Malachi Joe's New Memoir A Letter from Your Father

The account begins on forty acres in rural South Carolina, bought for one hundred dollars in the late 1930s, where eleven children grew up under strict rules enforced with love. Joe writes about segregated schools and an IQ test he was ashamed to be praised for, and about a little sister lost to rheumatic fever and a vow to cure it that he never kept. The chapters move in order, the way a life does, broken by short letters addressed directly to his children and by poems.

At the center of the book there is a question the author cannot answer. He does not know where his father was born, or the names of his paternal grandparents. That gap functions as a missing foundation stone beneath everything else: the draft notice in March 1968, two tours in Southeast Asia, the sandbag hooch and the mine sweeps, the flight home to a country that had moved on. Marriage, divorce, a blended family, and a daughter who ran follow.

Malachi Joe stated, "I wanted my children and their children to have something sturdier than hearsay. Know your roots, value education and character, and carry forward love, resilience, and honesty. That is the whole of what I have to leave."

The book is categorized as Biography and Autobiography, African American and Black. It is aimed at readers between 40 and 80 who seek firsthand accounts of the Jim Crow South and the Vietnam era, and who read memoirs for the testimony. Joe served seven years in the U.S. Army and was awarded the Bronze Star Medal, the Air Medal, the Vietnam Service Medal, and the Vietnam Cross of Gallantry with Palm, twice. He writes about those years plainly, including the sleepless nights and the long stretch before anyone had a name for what he was experiencing.

The release arrives as interest in genealogy, ancestry research, and veteran oral history continues to draw general readers, and as the generation that came of age under segregation. Joe offers the book to veterans, to families carrying the weight of unspoken history, and to anyone who has wondered who they really came from.

A Letter from Your Father is available for purchase online at Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com.

About the Author: Malachi Joe was drafted into the U.S. Army in March 1968 and served seven years, two of them in Southeast Asia. His first tour in Vietnam was with the 1st Air Cavalry Division; a year and a half after coming home, he returned to the country again, assigned to MACV, Military Assistance Command, Vietnam. He was awarded the Bronze Star Medal, the Air Medal, the Vietnam Service Medal, and the Vietnam Cross of Gallantry with Palm, twice. He writes about those years plainly, without polish, including the sleepless nights and the long stretch before anyone had a name for what he was carrying.

He grew up the ninth of eleven children on a forty-acre farm in rural South Carolina, land his father bought in the late 1930s for a hundred dollars in back taxes. He learned to drive a Farmall tractor at nine, carried stove wood for his mother before school, and lost his younger sister Peggy to rheumatic fever when he was a boy, a loss that shaped the rest of his life and much of this book. After his discharge he went back to college to study electronics engineering, then spent twenty-six years with Underwriters Laboratories, retiring as an Engineering Associate Lead.

Writing came late and came as medicine. Poetry, taken up on a therapist's suggestion he initially ignored, became the way he worked through decades of feeling irrelevant; his first book, The Transformative Power of Poetry, grew out of that practice. A Letter from Your Father is addressed directly to his children and to descendants he will never meet, a record of where they came from set down before, as he puts it, his memory fades into darkness.

About the Book:

Title: A Letter from Your Father
Author: Malachi Joe

Publisher: Palmetto Publishing
Publication date: October 27, 2026
ISBN-13: 9798318843655, 9798318843648

SOURCE Palmetto Publishing