A classic ethnography of the social networks and kin structures of low-income Black Americans in a the early 1970′s. This book helped me a great deal when I conducted an ethnographic study in an urban, low-income US city in 2009. Some of the findings in the book might be anachronistic or place specific, but she gives the reader a great deal of insight into the logic of these structures. Rather than seeing household and kin ties as deviant, the way many Americans do, she shows that they make perfect sense given the history and political-economic conditions of the people in her study.