Tracing the trilogy

African American Review, Spring, 1998 by Eleanora E. Tate

My writing room and our front porch on Carver Street located in the main African American neighborhood of Myrtle Beach became a window into a state whose heritage of exciting, evolving, and often turbulent African American struggle is evidenced not necessarily through the physical and rhetorical "plantations" found on almost every corner in the region, but more through the evidence of things not seen. Felt instead, from boneside out. What I saw and experienced in Myrtle Beach and Horry County - with its contrasting beer-guzzling, golf-crazy, yellow-shirt-and-green-pant-wearing, bikini-biker-beach resort-attracting, plat-eye ghost-roaming, millionaire and poverty-stricken, overalls- to swimsuit-wearing, tobacco-chewing, snuff-dipping, Gullah-speaking, roots- and hoodoo-working, fight-for-the-Confederate flag-till-you-die-evoking, pageant-prancing, ancestor-worshiping lifestyles - went straight into the books. I didn't have to make what I wrote larger than life, in other words.

All I had to do for The Secret of Gumbo Grove was create a strong sense of place in a mythical "Calvary" County, South Carolina, to collect obscure history, develop full-fledged characters, particularly strong-willed Raisin Stackhouse (who'd probably be a rocket scientist by now), and then transform these observations, emotions, personalities, and research into a meaningful dialogue with the reader. That alone took me seven years.

Having done that, writing the second and third books was easier, because they take place in the same county. All I needed to do then was give voices to their heroines, Mary Elouise Avery in Thank You, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.! and Zambia Brown of "itsy-bitsy, do-nothin', countrified" Deacons Neck, South Carolina, in A Blessing in Disguise. An American Bookseller "Pick of the Lists," A Blessing in Disguise is "a timely book that speaks to the subject of drugs and crime in a rural Southern town," wrote School Library Journal, "and a valuable addition to most collections." The ALA Booklist called Thank You, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.! "clear-eyed and accessible," and it was named a National Council for the Social Studies-Children's Book Council Notable Children's Book. Kirkus gave The Secret of Gumbo Grove a "pointer" and called it "a slice of Americana that would be widely enjoyed." Gumbo Grove received a Parents' Choice Gold Seal award, was featured on National Public Radio's All Things Considered, and remains on state children's book recommended reading lists. Both Gumbo Grove and Thank You, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.! are under contract to be made into audiotapes by Recorded Books, Inc.

I've tried to offer a body of work that brings northeast coastal South Carolina into a finer perspective for both young and young-at-heart readers everywhere. If nothing else, the collection might in some way nullify the claim expressed years ago to me during my initial research - which I have Raisin's teacher tell her - "that nobody Black around here had ever done anything good worth talking about" (Secret 16).

Over the years children have sent me scads of letters about these books. They relate to eleven-year-old Raisin's efforts to collect her family's and local Black history and save her church's neglected cemetery. These readers also understand Mary Elouise's anguish over friendships and the undeserved shame she feels about her dark brown skin color and kinky hair. And many know what drugs and crime can do to families when they inundate neighborhoods like drugs and crime do in Zambia's.

Elementary and middle school teachers use Gumbo Grove in their classrooms not only as enjoyable reading material, but also to stimulate students into becoming more interested in their own neighborhoods and communities. Many other educators and librarians have developed innovative and enjoyable lesson plans across the curriculum using The Secret of Gumbo Grove and Thank You, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.! After they passed their projects on to me, I developed a teacher's guide for the books. More recently, media specialist Pat Scales of Greenville, South Carolina, developed one for A Blessing in Disguise that can be downloaded from Bantam Doubleday Dell's website for teachers (www.bdd.com/teachers).

The genesis of the work - the trail of the trilogy - began at 5:30 a.m. on July 17, 1978, when my U.S. Air Force husband Zack Hamlett, III, and I and our daughter Gretchen moved to Myrtle Beach from Jackson, Tennessee. Myrtle Beach Air Force Base would be his first - and last - place of duty. We rolled into the driveway of the Myrtle Beach duplex that would be our off-base rented home until we built a house a few years later on nearby Carver Street. I stepped out onto the coquina driveway in the dew-wet dawn. Across the street the sun was barely reaching over the roof of the nightclub that would become one of my prototypes for Mr. Eseau's Gumbo Limbo Soda Fountain and Cafe in Gumbo Grove and for Vernon "Snake" LaRange's Studio Paradise nightclub in A Blessing in Disguise.