Melissa Fay Greene - Praying for Sheetrock

Praise forPraying for Sheetrock

A luridly entertaining nonfiction debut... a cautionary tale as wonderfully knotty as a plank of Georgia pine...

Newsweek

Melissa Fay Greene has written a superb account of life and struggle in a tiny place. Because of its themes and the brilliant way the author has handled them, this book could stand as a metaphor for the halting American effort to become something better than we have been... Most of all, it is a story of simple black people enduring and rising very, very slowly and then a little faster on the broad back of a flawed leader who ultimately breaks because he is human and has aspirations and burdens that push him past his limits.

Los Angeles Times

Greenes achievement recalls Jane Austens description of her novels as fine brushwork on a little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory... What Greene has written is political history of a rare kind...

The New Yorker

The facts and much more spring to life in Melissa Fay Greenes dazzling first book... The civil rights movement will never look quite the same.

The Nation

No, Praying for Sheetrock isnt a novel: it is a highly original work of [nonfiction], with elements of what we seek in serious fiction. There is a landscape of mystery in coastal Georgia: a Robin Hoodlike sheriff who owns four houses and his own airfield but is otherwise a charming good old boy; the first black county commissioner since Reconstruction; a handful of heroic white Legal Services lawyers charging into town.... The personalities in this remarkable book are like Faulknerian characters.

The New York Times

ALSO BY MELISSA FAY GREENE

There Is No Me Without You: One Womans Odyssey to Rescue Africas Children

Last Man Out: The Story of the Springhill Mine Disaster

The Temple Bombing

Copyright 1991 by Melissa Fay Greene

Readers Guide copyright 2006 by Melissa Fay Greene

Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book and the publisher was aware of a trademark claim, the designations have been printed in initial capital letters (e.g., Sheetrock, which is a registered trademark of United States Gypsum Company).

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Printed in the United States of America.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Silver Jingle Music for permission to reprint previously published excerpts from The Saga of the Great Sapelo Bust, by Vic Waters. Copyright 1978 by Vic Waters. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

Cataloging-in-Publication data for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

First Da Capo Press edition 2006

Originally published by Addison-Wesley

ISBN-13: 978-0-306-82495-1

Published by Da Capo Press

A Member of the Perseus Books Group

http://www.dacapopress.com

Da Capo Press books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the U.S. by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 11 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA 02142, or call (800) 255-1514 or (617) 252-5298, or e-mail .

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To my mother, Rosalyn Pollock Greene

To my husbands mother and father, Ruth and Howard Samuel

To my father of blessed memory, Gerald A. Greene

Contents

Glacial epochs are great things, but they are vague, vague, wrote Mark Twain. And so it is with historical epochs.

After the fact, historians may look back upon a season when a thousand lives, a hundred thousand lives, moved in unison; but in the beginning there are really only individuals, acting in isolation and uncertainty, out of necessity or idealism, unaware they are living through an epoch.

McIntosh County, on the flowery coast of Georgiasmall, isolated, lovelyexperienced the same grand historical tremors and transformations as the rest of America in recent years as long-entrenched authority began to yield to the democratic demands of social and political outsiders.

But in McIntosh, entrenched authority was not numberless white men, generals, captains of industry, and vast hierarchies of elected and appointed officials: it was one white man, Sheriff Tom Poppell. And the demands of social outsiders and political new-comers were not expressed by hundreds of eloquent leaders rising from the churches and universities, nor by hundreds of thousands of protesters in the streets: the new demands were worded by one stammering, uneducated, local black man, Thurnell Alston, a disabled boilermaker, standing in front of a hundred quiet country people.

The official history of the civil rights movement is told like a litany at times, as if well-anticipated goals were achieved in a series of distinct and strategic skirmishes: Montgomery, Little Rock, Greensboro, Albany. But it happened in McIntosh County, too. Whether you see the place as a footnote or as the front lines, it happened here, too.

In order to see how it happenedhow old Southern political traditions faded into modern times; how the U.S. Constitution eradicated local county customs; how people faced the issues of the day not by race alone, but according to their inner moral compassesone must drop down to the level of the sidewalks, kitchens, and backyards. What were people saying? Who was saying what? How did their own histories, biases, and perceptions inspire them? And why did an epoch of social change play differently here than in New York or Detroit, Atlanta or Memphis, or in the small county up the road?

This is a chronicle of large and important things happening in a very little place. It is about the end of the good old boy era and the rise of civil rights, and what that famous epoch looked like, sounded like, smelled like, and felt like in a Georgia backwater in the 1970s.

McIntosh County is pretty country and its got some nice people, but its the most different place Ive ever been to in my life.

Harry Coursey, GBI Special Agent, Savannah