White Gloves and Collards is the story of a privileged childhood in Edenton, North Carolina, a small southern town that cherishes its customs and history as symbolized by the Confederate Monument at the foot of Broad Street.
As she copes with the untimely deaths of her parents, young Helen observes how the community is coping with a different kind of loss—an end to the Jim Crow rules of behavior they’ve always lived by. With love and support from a brainy older brother, an eclectic extended family (many of whom are segregationists), and a wise African-American maid, she tries to make sense of the changes taking place around her, both in her personal life and in society as a whole. |
Written with humor and heart-wrenching honesty, this is not a typical civil rights era morality tale where heroes and villains are clearly delineated. Rather, it’s the story of everyday people dealing with change the best they know how. For some, that meant clinging to the myths of the past. For others it meant opening hearts and minds. And for Helen with her personal struggles, it meant doing a little bit of both.
"Traveling at a cruising altitude of 25,000 feet, I couldn’t see the shift in landscape below me—the concrete expanse of the Eastern Seaboard now interspersed with fields of green and brown, the grayish haze surrounding city skylines replaced by cotton-like clouds over gentler sprawl. We’d crossed the Mason-Dixon Line, which a hundred years after being surveyed to settle a property dispute, would come to represent the cultural and political boundary between North and South, and then a hundred or so years after that, separate me from the life I’d been born into and the life that I chose." (Opening paragraph of White Gloves and Collards)
|
White Gloves and Collards is available on Kindle and paperback through Amazon. It is also available to retailers and libraries through Ingram's distribution services.