SOMETIMES IT WAS BEAUTIFUL is a very different kind of book in the annals of work published in the American and African-African tradition. It is a true to life story told by PT Armstrong, a man whose incredible life began as the son of an impoverished sharecropper in Texas but who survived those slave-like beginnings to experience the kind of adventures that only a handful of people are still alive to talk about. Despite such life-threatening adversities as severe poverty and Jim Crow racism—when we worked as a “muleskinner”-- Armstrong tended to be “lucky in love.”