Real Stories

It's been a joy to have discussions about my new book Florida, A Love Story.

Set in the 1800s, it is an exciting, fast paced story of old Florida.  The history is real but the story is fiction. 

Or is it?

Many of the events in Florida, A Love Story happened to me - but not all in Florida.  In the late 1960s my husband, Ken, and I, and our two preschool children, left Florida and headed to Georgia where he attended Candler School of Theology at Emory University.  For the first two years Ken was a "student" pastor in North Georgia. We had a circuit of three churches, Bold Spring, Trinity and Liberty.  Yes, Ken was a circuit rider.   

We were life long urbanites with a civil rights background one week and the next week were were living in a church parsonage in the deep south.  And Ken's new name was "Preacher."

This experience was truly like stepping back in history. 

The very first day we arrived we visited a home where a man had died the day before.  Not only were we greeted by family members in the parlor but he was there as well, in a home made coffin in the middle of the room.  No funeral home.  They buried him the next day in the graveyard next to the church - after the "preacher" said a few words.  

It was on the back porch of the parsonage that I discovered a bag of beans and had no idea what to do with it until I discovered it was black eyed peas (just like Catherine did in the book.)  

Sometime during that two years a racist (his description) ax wielding Lester Maddox was running for governor against Bo Calloway.  We voted in the church building.  There was absolutely no privacy. Every person knew how we voted.  But if that wasn't enough, when the weekly paper came out they recorded the count.  87 votes for Maddox, 2 for Calloway.  (Just like the experience Sam had in the book.)

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The two year experience of living in North Georgia was good for us.  We learned to love these people - with whom we had very little in common and they were very excepting of us.  However I'm sure they thought of us much like the community of Oconee thought of Catherine and Sam.  "It's like the dang king and queen of England decided to take up ranching' in the middle of the swamp! They don't know nothin' about nothin'."

When we visited the smallest of the three churches on the circuit, Liberty, we made sure we went to the bathroom before leaving home because Liberty had no running water, and only an outhouse for those in need.  The kids and I entered the church when we arrived and sat on the right with the rest of the women.  Ken stayed outside with the men who were hanging around their old trucks, plus one family always came in a horse drawn buggy.  At the beginning of the last hymn, that we sang by "lining," the men entered and sat on the left.  

Yes, this is exactly the same situation Cole encountered  during his short stent as a circuit riding preacher in the 1800s. 

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