PREFACE

 This collection of stories is a fictional memoir.  Through first-person tales, I aim to convey a sense of a particular kind of Southern life that may not be widely known.

The setting of the stories, for the most part, is De Funiak Springs, Florida, a small Northwest Florida town located thirty miles south of the Alabama border and an equal distance north of the Gulf of Mexico.  The time, the late 1920s through the mid-1940s, is a period which went from Depression era, sparse economic sufficiency for a majority of white people to economic despair for both white and black people, and then to hope and the beginnings of recovery just before and including the early World War II years.

The small town I knew was not that of the decadence and meanness so frequently portrayed in Southern literature and Hollywood films.  Rather, it was a time and place of innocence and enjoyment of simple pleasures overlaid with the strong influence of religion; the persons in the stories are not living out the remnants of plantation life, nor are they the familiarly stereotyped illiterate rural whites or wholly subservient blacks.

That black people were not treated as equals was as true in my town as elsewhere in the nation, prior to the historic U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision and the Civil Rights reforms that followed. However, humanity and relatedness existed in our racially interwoven, socially separated lives.

I hope that portrayals of black people in these accounts will provide insight into their influence on the lives of white people, sometimes subtle, sometimes dramatic.  At least, this is the way I was affected. Perhaps, too, the stories will add a dimension of understanding and something of the admiration the writer feels for people of African descent who demonstrated strength to endure, dignity despite humiliations, and graciousness of spirit.

I know how fortunate I was to have been born into a loving family, a family of strong convictions with some of us fitting the label of maverick while adhering closely to the structured manners and mores of the times and the town. I am grateful, too, to have grown up in a community of caring and interesting people.

While each story is based upon actual occurrences and as true to facts as I can ascertain, some sequences of action are compressed into a smaller time frame, and some characters and situations are composites of several persons and experiences. For example, Rosalie in "Five Miles from Argyle” is not one little girl but two, and the male figure in “Walk Around the Lake” is no one individual. "The Day the Yankees Come" is an adaptation of a story recorded by Bernice Morrison Gillis.

My hope is that these stories will preserve something of the history of the community of De Funiak Springs as well as the character and relationships of the people.

Marjorie Morrison Moylan Menlo Park, California July, 1991