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OAKLAND — It was their last piece of salt pork.

It sat at the bottom of a pot, seasoning collard greens that would be served with dinner. Oral Lee Brown watched her mother prepare food in their small Mississippi home. Although the family was far from well off, Brown and her 11 siblings never went hungry.

A young neighbor knocked on the door, asking for whatever meat they could spare to prepare her own collard greens. Oral Lee Brown watched her mother pull that last piece of salt pork out of the pot, cut it in half, wrap it, and hand it to their neighbor.

"When you give all you got, I think that's the greatest gift anyone can give," Brown said. "In the '50s and '60s, in the South, it really was a village. Everyone looked out for each other.

The Nothern America rights to 'The Promise: The Story of a Woman with a Big Heart and Even Bigger Dreams', the memoirs of Oral Lee Brown has been sold to Doubleday (Randomhouse).

The book is being written in conjuction with Caille Millner, whose work has appeared in Children of the Dream: Growing Up Black in America, Essence magazine, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, Newsweek, Art & Understanding, and The Fader. Millner has received awards from the National Foundation for the Advancement of the Arts, the National Press Club, and the New York Black Journalists’ Association, as well as a Berta Ledecky Fellowship from Harvard Magazine. In addition, she was recently voted one of Columbia Journalism Review’s "Ten Young Writers to Watch."

The book will be published in September of 2004.