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In a recent episode of Star Communications' show We Should Know, host JW Simmons sits down with Leo Daughtry to talk about his novel Talmadge Farm and the world that shaped it. Over the course of the conversation, Leo walks through life on a tobacco farm in northern Sampson County, his years in public service, and why he chose to capture the years 1957-1967 in fiction.
Talmadge Farm, published by Story Merchant Books, follows a large tobacco operation, the families who own it, and the families who work it during a decade of rapid change in eastern North Carolina. The book has clearly struck a chord: it is now the #1 best-selling paperback in Amazon's Historical Event Literature Criticism category, with more than 4,000 copies sold and record-breaking November sales, even passing classics in its category like The Great Gatsby and Don Quixote.
The Writers Lifeline has been supporting the marketing and promotion of Talmadge Farm as the book finds new readers well beyond Sampson County.
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You can listen to the full interview here: We Should Know - Leo Daughtry on Talmadge Farm
And you can find the book here: Get Talmadge Farm on Amazon
The world Leo writes about
He also remembers segregation as a simple fact of daily life. Black families had a separate school. They could not eat in most local restaurants. They had to use different water fountains and could not try on clothes in some stores. What stuck with him most was the bus ride: he would get on one school bus while friends who lived just a couple hundred yards away got on another.
The novel takes that world and gives it a specific shape. Talmadge Farm is an 1,800-acre operation owned by Gordon and Claire Townage. Gordon comes from a family that built a bank and accumulated land; Claire comes from a family that owns the drugstore in town. Together they represent the comfortable, confident top of the local ladder.
On the same land live two sharecropping families, one white and one Black. They farm, raise children, and try to get through each year under a system where the land and the credit belong to someone else. Their lives are different in many ways, but they share the same basic vulnerability: if the crop fails or the numbers don't work, they have few options.
Leo describes Talmadge Farm as historical fiction. The characters are composites of people he knew, but the events and conditions are drawn from what he remembers:
- the separate schools and facilities of the 1950s
- the expectations placed on women before no-fault divorce and reliable birth control
- the central role of tobacco in small-town economies
- the arrival of the Vietnam War and what it meant for young men who joined the military as a way off the farm
- the shift from tenant farmers to migrant crews as farms grew larger and more mechanized
In the interview, he talks about recap tires, bootleg liquor, and long overnight trips to sell vegetables in northern markets and haul used taxi tires back to be recapped. Those details show up in the book as part of the everyday effort to keep families afloat. There's nothing romantic about it; it's work, improvisation, and survival.
A few moments that stand out
The conversation also touches on several key moments from the book without giving away every twist.
One is an incident involving Ella, a Black teenager whose mother has worked in the Townage household since she was very young. Gordon Junior, the landowner's son, assumes he can take what he wants from her. When he tries to force himself on Ella, her brother steps in and stops him. In the world Leo is describing, this is not just a family conflict. There is a real risk that the legal system will side with Gordon Junior, not with the sharecropper's family. The scene in the novel grows directly out of that imbalance.
Another thread runs through the lives of Gordon and Claire themselves. At the beginning of the story, they appear to have every advantage: land, money, status, and a sense that the system is built for them. As the years go by, the tobacco economy changes, social expectations shift, and Gordon's refusal to adapt catches up with him. Late in the book, he tells Claire that, after everything else is gone, "we're all that we've got left." Coming from a man who once saw himself as untouchable, that line lands with particular weight.
Leo and JW also talk about the gradual disappearance of tenant farmers and the arrival of migrant crews. As he tells it, workers were sometimes gathered off the streets in Florida-some struggling with mental illness or addiction-loaded onto old school buses, driven north, and put to work in the fields under strict control. In the novel, these crews are part of a new phase on the land, replacing the older sharecropping structure but bringing their own set of problems.
Why the story feels current
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Although Talmadge Farm is set between 1957 and 1967, the interview keeps circling back to the present. Leo remembers how few divorces there were in the 1950s, and how strongly women were expected to stay in difficult marriages. He and JW then look at how the arrival of the pill and later changes in law began to alter that dynamic. They move from the segregated schools of his childhood to later years when students finally began attending school together.
They also compare political life then and now. Leo talks about serving in the legislature in the 1970s, '80s, and '90s, when lawmakers with very different views could still sit down, argue, and eventually pass a budget. He contrasts that with more recent years, where compromise is often treated as weakness and budgets sometimes stall for years.
Later in the conversation, they jump forward to today's technology: rare earth magnet manufacturing in their region, artificial intelligence, satellite communications, and driverless cars. JW brings up Elon Musk's comment that work might become "optional" someday because of automation. Leo doesn't claim to know how that will play out, but he does say that in his own time, people who refused to adjust to change were often left behind.
That combination-clear memory of one decade of rapid change, plus an awareness of the changes happening now-is part of what gives the interview (and the book) its energy. The story of Talmadge Farm is firmly rooted in one place and one period, but the questions underneath it are familiar:
- Who holds power when the rules are written a certain way?
- What happens when the economic base of a community shifts?
- How do people at different points on the ladder experience the same event?
- What carries forward when one system ends and another begins?
Where to go next
For anyone interested in this chapter of North Carolina history-or in how a lifetime of experience can become a first novel-Leo's conversation with JW Simmons is a good entry point. It gives context to Talmadge Farm without turning into a lecture, and lets you hear the voice behind the story.
You can watch or listen here:
👉 We Should Know - Leo Daughtry on Talmadge Farm
Read the review in Southern Literary Review - book review of Talmadge Farm: https://southernlitreview.com/reviews/talmadge-farm-by-leo-daughtry-2.htm
👉 Get the book on Amazon: Talmadge Farm by Leo Daughtry
Talmadge Farm is published by Story Merchant Books. The Writers Lifeline has been working with Leo and Story Merchant on the marketing and promotion side so the book doesn't just appear and vanish, but continues to find its audience over time.
If you'd like to explore similar support for your own work, you can read more about our services here:
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