BIG Congratulations to the talented Justin Allen Price Voice Over WINNER of the One Voice Award for best performance of an audiobook/fiction for his narration of Story Merchant Book's Talmadge Farm by Leo Daughtry - Author - Talmadge Farm!
You can now LISTEN to Talmadge Farm on Audible!
“Set in North Carolina in the 1950s and 60s, Leo Daughtry’s story gives readers a cast of flawed characters that elicit sympathy, anger, love and hate.
The Talmadges, landed gentry, and their two sharecropper families try to adjust to the changing political, economic and social landscape of the decade.
Gordon Talmadge commits one mistake after another, ultimately destroying the legacy handed to him, as his loyal wife Claire stands by his side while the sharecropper families – one black, one white – are ultimately driven off the farm for better and for worse. A page turner.”
— George Kolber, author of Thrown Upon the World, and writer/producer of Miranda’s Victim
“In this stirring novel, Leo Daughtry creates a big, complicated portrait of family, place, race, class, and greed. Set in North Carolina, Talmadge Farm tells the story of three intertwined families. Daughtry delves deep into the heart of his characters. You’ll almost forget that you don’t know them personally; this story feels that real.”
— Judy Goldman, author of Child: A Memoir and Together: A Memoir of a Marriage and a Medical Mishap
“Talmadge Farm is a classic. Through the lives of a farm owner’s family and their sharecropping tenants, Leo Daughtry weaves a story about the emerging South. This is a story of triumph and tragedy, of good and evil, and finally reconciliation. A true morality play.”
— Gene Hoots, former tobacco executive and author of Going Down Tobacco Road
"Talmadge Farm has often been described as a love letter to the South. Daughtry says, “Despite what the South has done and is doing, everybody loves the South. The South has a charm about it, and this book talks about the good parts of the South, how good the people are, and what the South has meant to so many of us… It’s a love story in many respects.”
It’s 1957, and tobacco is king. Wealthy landowner Gordon Talmadge enjoys the lavish lifestyle he inherited but doesn’t like getting his hands dirty; he leaves that to the two sharecroppers – one white, one Black – who farm his tobacco but have bigger dreams for their own children. While Gordon takes no interest in the lives of his tenant farmers, a brutal attack between his son and the sharecropper children sets off a chain of events that leaves no one unscathed. Over the span of a decade, Gordon struggles to hold on to his family’s legacy as the old order makes way for a New South.
“Talmadge Farm” is a sweeping drama that follows three unforgettable families navigating the changing culture of North Carolina at a pivotal moment in history. A love letter to the American South, the novel is a story of resilience, hope, and family – both lost and found.
What inspired you to write “Talmadge Farm?”
I lived through changing times, particularly the 1950s when there was nearly complete segregation in the South, especially in rural areas. Sharecropping was common, and women did not divorce in those times because it was considered demeaning, a failure. Then in the 1960s, everything began to change. Sharecropping disappeared, birth control entered the picture, and women could live life with more freedom and less dependence on men.
Can you tell us more about your family history and its connection to North Carolina and tobacco?
How did this environment influence your writing?
Beyond the direct associations with tobacco and North Carolina, are there more subtle aspects of your upbringing and family history that influenced your writing?
Tobacco was king in North Carolina. People practically worshiped it. Where I grew up, it put food on the table. Cotton was more up and down, but tobacco provided financial stability, not just for farmers but for the whole community. My family grew tobacco, sold fertilizer and seed, and managed a tobacco auction. It was our whole world.
You have had a successful career as a lawyer and an Air Force Captain before that. What prompted you to pursue writing fiction?
I always had the idea for this particular story in my head. The 1950s and 1960s were two decades that changed the world, and a farm with sharecroppers is a bit of a pressure cooker environment. You have the farmowner’s family – in many cases people of wealth and entitlement – living just down the driveway from the sharecropping families. The sharecroppers were poor and had limited options, so they felt stuck living on a farm that didn’t belong to them doing backbreaking work with no way out. It’s a situation that lends itself to drama: families with major differences in class/race/socioeconomic status living in such close proximity to one another.
How has the landscape of tobacco farming changed, and how did you incorporate those changes into the plot of “Talmadge Farm?”
Probably the biggest change was the shift from sharecropping to migrant workers. Today, tobacco farmers are large corporations that use migrant workers as laborers. But in the 1950s, farming relied almost completely on sharecropping, which was a hard life. Tobacco farming is physically demanding work, and sharecroppers needed the help of all family members to complete the various steps – planting, seeding, suckering, priming, worming, and cropping – of harvesting the crop.
Sharecroppers at one farm would help sharecroppers at the neighboring farm because they did not have the resources to hire extra people. In the 1950s, sharecroppers were unable to get credit anywhere but at the general store and maybe the feed store. They truly lived hand to mouth all the time, only able to pay their debts after the tobacco auction in the fall. Hence the phrase “sold my soul to the company store.” Sharecroppers often turned to moonshining as a way to make extra money.
As I describe in the novel, sharecropping began to disappear in the 1960s as children of sharecroppers started taking advantage of new opportunities that the changing society offered. Migrant workers took over the labor of farming. In addition to labor changes, new machinery improved the industry. N.C. State was instrumental in developing advances in the farming world. Legislation changed and farmers were allowed to have acreage allotments outside of the land they owned. I touch on all of these changes in the novel.
Are any of the characters in your book based on real people?
Not really. The closest characters to real people in my life are the characters of Jake and Bobby Lee. Jake is a Black teenager who wants to escape farm life and ends up running away to Philadelphia to become a success. Bobby Lee is a young Black soldier stationed at Fort Bragg. On the farm where I grew up, there was a Black sharecropping family with four sons, the youngest of whom was my age. We were very good friends.
All of the boys were bright and athletic, could fix anything, yet were limited in their opportunities. They didn’t have a school to go to or a job to look forward to. Their only options were to stay on the farm or join the army. The character of Gordon, while not based on any one person, reminds me of a lot of men I knew who did not treat women well, who were racist, who enjoyed the status quo and were resistant to anything that threatened their way of life.
In addition to the changing tobacco farming methodologies, the 1950s ushered in a period of profound social change, marked notably by the introduction of credit cards. How did these outside factors impact farming, and in what ways did they inform the development of the plot in “Talmadge Farm?”
In the novel, Gordon is the president of the local bank, yet he resists the advances in the banking industry, including credit cards and car loans and the incursion of national banks into rural communities. Gordon’s father, who founded the bank, was a brilliant man adept at navigating the bank through changing times, but Gordon simply doesn’t have the smarts to see what’s coming, and no one can get through to him. He’d rather play a round of golf than look at the balance sheet.
Leo Daughtry is a life-long resident of North Carolina. He grew up among the tobacco fields of Sampson County which served as inspiration for his debut novel, “Talmadge Farm.” After graduating from Wake Forest University and its School of Law, he established a private law practice in Smithfield, N.C.
He was a member of the N.C. House and Senate for 28 years, including serving as House Majority Leader and House Minority Leader. When not practicing law, Leo enjoys spending time in Atlantic Beach with his wife and daughters.
Praise for “Talmadge Farm”
“Set in North Carolina in the 1950s and 60s, Leo Daughtry’s story gives readers a cast of flawed characters that elicit sympathy, anger, love and hate.
The Talmadges, landed gentry, and their two sharecropper families try to adjust to the changing political, economic and social landscape of the decade.
Gordon Talmadge commits one mistake after another, ultimately destroying the legacy handed to him, as his loyal wife Claire stands by his side while the sharecropper families – one black, one white – are ultimately driven off the farm for better and for worse. A page turner.”
— George Kolber, author of Thrown Upon the World, and writer/producer of Miranda’s Victim
“In this stirring novel, Leo Daughtry creates a big, complicated portrait of family, place, race, class, and greed. Set in North Carolina, Talmadge Farm tells the story of three intertwined families. Daughtry delves deep into the heart of his characters. You’ll almost forget that you don’t know them personally; this story feels that real.”
— Judy Goldman, author of Child: A Memoir and Together: A Memoir of a Marriage and a Medical Mishap
“Talmadge Farm is a classic. Through the lives of a farm owner’s family and their sharecropping tenants, Leo Daughtry weaves a story about the emerging South. This is a story of triumph and tragedy, of good and evil, and finally reconciliation. A true morality play.”
— Gene Hoots, former tobacco executive and author of Going Down Tobacco Road
Double Deac Leo Daughtry draws on memories of his childhood tobacco farm to write a historical novel about the South.
Leo Daughtry (’62, JD ’65) drew inspiration and many of the characters for his historical novel “Talmadge Farm” from his years growing up on a tobacco farm in eastern North Carolina in the 1950s.
Daughtry, 84, grew up in rural Sampson County, about an hour southeast of Raleigh, on a farm owned by his father. He weaves a story of the wealthy Talmadge family and two sharecropper families — one white, one Black — whose lives intertwine against the backdrop of socioeconomic and racial changes sweeping the South that upend their lives in different ways. He draws from boyhood memories of dove hunting, moonshiners, segregation, the backbreaking work of harvesting tobacco and sharecroppers scraping to survive at a time when tobacco was king in North Carolina.
One reviewer described “Talmadge Farm” as a “stirring novel” with a “big, complicated portrait of family, place, race, class and greed.” The novel won first place in historical fiction in the 2025 Feathered Quill Book Awards and was named a finalist for the 2024 Goethe Book Awards for late historical fiction.
Daughtry and his wife, Helen, live in Smithfield, North Carolina. His granddaughters, Katherine Riley (’20) and Hannah Riley (’24), are also alumni.
Daughtry was a Judge Advocate General in the U.S. Air Force before founding law firm Daughtry, Woodard, Lawrence & Starling in Smithfield in 1969. He served in the North Carolina House and Senate for 28 years, and was House majority and minority leader, until retiring in 2017. A past member of the Alumni Council and School of Law Board of Visitors, he has endowed scholarships in the college and law school. The law school named its North Carolina Business Court courtroom in his honor in 2018. The North Carolina Bar Association established the N. Leo Daughtry Justice Fund in 2022.
Kerry M. King (’85) of Wake Forest Magazine talked with Daughtry by Zoom at his office in Smithfield. Excerpts from their conversation have been edited for length and clarity.
Kerry King: Before we talk about “Talmadge Farm,” I’m curious to know why you came to Wake Forest and what it was like when you were a student.
Leo Daughtry: My brother-in-law (Bill Peak ’48, MD ’51) went to Wake Forest, and I followed Wake Forest sports — Dickie Hemric (’55) and players like that. There was a tournament called the Dixie Classic (held in Raleigh from 1949 to 1960) where the Big Four (Wake Forest, Duke, NC State and UNC-Chapel Hill) would play four other schools, and we would go to at least one game to see Wake Forest play.
Wake Forest had recently moved to Winston. Dr. (Harold) Tribble (LL.D. ’48, P ’55) was president. We had chapel on Tuesdays and Thursdays. There was no dancing on campus. If we had parties, we’d have them off campus. For football games, we all wore suits. If you were lucky enough to have a date, you always got her a mum or flower to wear.
Wake Forest was great for me. It allowed me to leave the tobacco farm and go to college and experience life in a different way than I had known before. And Wake Forest was very patient with me. I tried to be a good student, but I just didn’t have the background. It took me a while to get my bearings.
The Vietnam War was really becoming an issue. I went into the Air Force (after graduating from law school) and served in Turkey, assigned to NATO.
KK: Do you remember any particular professors, either in college or in law school?
LD: Dr. (John) Broderick in English, Dr. (Emmett Willard) Hamrick (P ’83) in religion, Dr. (David) Smiley (P ’74) in history and Dr. (Kenneth) Raynor (1914) in math. Dr. (Marcel) Delgado got me through Spanish. I didn’t have Dr. (Ed) Wilson (’43, P ’91, ’93) for a class, but I certainly knew and liked him. He was one of the finest guys and represented Wake Forest so well. I’ve gotten to know his son (Ed Wilson Jr. JD ’93), who is a judge.
In law school, Dr. (James) Webster (’49, JD ’51, P ’81), Dr. (Hugh) Divine, Dr. (Robert) Lee (JD 1928, P ’55, ’68), Dr. (Norman) Wiggins (’50, JD ’52). They were all good teachers.
KK: You had a long career as a lawyer and in the General Assembly. What inspired you to write “Talmadge Farm”?
LD: It had been germinating a long time. I wrote it from an outline I did when I was in the General Assembly. We’d have some debates that I didn’t have to be involved in, so I had some free time. I knew the characters I wanted in the book. The reason I chose the name Talmadge is because I didn’t know anybody named Talmadge so I could make him the bad guy. (Gordon Talmadge, a banker and the owner of Talmadge farm, is the book’s central character.) I would write the outline and then change it, and then write it and change it. I knew where I wanted to start and where I wanted to end.
Leo Daughtry ('62, JD '65), author of "Talmadge Farm"
KK: What were the major themes you wanted to write about?
LD: Well, sharecropping for one thing, and the 1950s. My most impressionable years were the late ’50s and early ’60s because I was a teenager. I saw all the changes that were beginning to occur in the South. I went to a very small country school, where half of the students at least were children of sharecroppers. I had Black sharecropper friends and white sharecropper friends. They had one thing in common. They were poor as church mice, and they had very little hope of getting ahead. Most of the kids that I knew wanted to get off the farm. Farms had gotten bigger, tobacco allotments had changed, and migrant workers were replacing the sharecroppers. And automation enabled farmers to be more efficient, and that just eliminated the sharecroppers.
(I also wanted to write) about change, how people have to change, and some people can change better than others. Gordon could not figure out how to change. He got left behind because of his inability to accept change.
KK: How much of the book draws from your experiences and people you knew growing up?
LD: Almost all of it. Gordon was invented; I had to have a villain. Everybody knows someone like Gordon. He had everything going for him, but he wasn’t very smart (and wouldn’t adapt to the changing South). Black people lived in a completely segregated environment then. I wanted to make all the women really strong (characters) because there were no women doctors or lawyers then.
KK: Alumni are sure to enjoy the tidbits you sprinkle in the book about Wake Forest, Winston-Salem, Old Salem and R.J. Reynolds. The book ends soon after one of the characters, David, graduates from Wake Forest. Was he based on you?
LD: No, but I really wanted David (the good son in the novel) to go to Wake Forest. I didn’t want the bad son (to go to Wake Forest). (One of the other characters) went to Bowman Gray (School of Medicine). And, I remember Christmas at Old Salem and those Moravian cookies.
It’s been 10 years in the making, but former North Carolina state Representative and Senator Leo Daughtry has released his debut novel “Talmadge Farm.”
“My first and last, probably,” Daughtry joked over the phone about his book. “It’s a lot of work.”
Daughtry is a Sampson County native now living in Smithfield. His 320-page novel is available now for purchase at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
He said last week that he’s spent years creating outlines for the book and then throwing them away before doing another one, all because they did not fit the story he wanted to tell.
“I probably started doing outlines 10 years ago. And I would do an outline, tear it up, and do another one. But I had in my head about what I wanted to do,” he said.
And that idea was to create a story based on events that he lived through growing up in Sampson County, namely sharecropping, the research into tobacco and how that affected the industry, and other societal changes taking place in the 1950s and 1960s.
“I wanted to have a book to sort of show the lives of the sharecroppers. And then show the changes that were taking place in the late 50s and 60s,” he admitted.
Daughtry went on to explain that his childhood of living in a rural town and going to a rural school where most of his classmates were the children of sharecroppers gave him the inspiration to write about their hardships and what happened to them as sharecropping started to die out.
“I went to a very rural school,” Daughtry explained of his years in the Hobbton district. “And in my class, I would say over half of the students, my classmates, were the children of sharecroppers. That was the way, in those days, that was the way farming was done.”
Making a living as a sharecropper, he said, was “a desperate and hard thing to do.” And that as the years went on, especially in the 1950s, it “became clear that sharecropping wasn’t really a good way to live.”
“Many of the children left the farm when they grew up,” Daughtry explained, “and some moved up north, particularly the African Americans. Many of them went into the army to get off the farm.”
He also mentioned woman getting clerical certificates to get an office job instead of working as a maid or in the fields, all of which were explored within the pages of “Talmadge Farm.”
But having children leave wasn’t the only change that happened to sharecropping families in this time.
Daughtry explained that the advances in technology and the growth of the farms led to sharecroppers leaving completely.
“You had the mechanization on the farms. Farms got larger, they consolidated, and so there was just no place for sharecroppers,” Daughtry said. “So, they left the farms. Some involuntary and some voluntary.”
Which then led to an influx of migrant workers, a subject that Daughtry also touched upon in his book. Other major events he talked about included segregation, the Vietnam War, and women’s rights.
And when talking about farming, Daughtry knew he would have to talk about the changes the tobacco industry and its farmers faced.
“Tobacco was king, but it was not going to be there forever. It was a contradiction. It was a way to make a living and support your family. And that’s a good thing. And then on the other hand, it was killing people who smoked and that’s a bad thing,” he explained.
Most of all, Daughtry wanted to tell a story through lenses of different characters, each with their own unique tie to the fictional Sampson County he had created in his book. They were characters, he said, that were easy to write and show the way that people in that time period could have adapted to all the changes happening around them.
“I think it was easier for the young people in the book to adapt and to change than it was for the older people. Their way of life was certainly, for the landowner, very satisfactory. They had someone going to work. They had someone looking after them. In other words, they had maids and cooks. They had a good life, and they didn’t particularly want to change,” Daughtry said about writing some of the characters.
A press release sent out by Books Forward gives “Talmadge Farm” the following synopsis:
“It’s 1957, and tobacco is king. Wealthy landowner Gordon Talmadge enjoys the lavish lifestyle he inherited but doesn’t like getting his hands dirty; he leaves that to the two sharecroppers – one white, one Black – who farm his tobacco but have bigger dreams for their own children. While Gordon takes no interest in the lives of his tenant farmers, a brutal attack between his son and the sharecropper children sets off a chain of events that leaves no one unscathed. Over the span of a decade, Gordon struggles to hold on to his family’s legacy as the old order makes way for a New South.”
What inspired you to write “Talmadge Farm?”
I lived through changing times, particularly the 1950s
when there was
nearly complete segregation in the South, especially in
rural areas.
Sharecropping was common, and women did not divorce in
those times
because it was considered demeaning, a failure. Then in
the 1960s,
everything began to change. Sharecropping disappeared,
birth control
entered the picture, and women could live life with more
freedom and less
dependence on men.
Can you tell us more about your family history and its
connection to
North Carolina and tobacco? How did this environment
influence your
writing? Beyond the direct associations with tobacco
and North
Carolina, are there more subtle aspects of your
upbringing and family
history that influenced your writing?
Tobacco was king in North Carolina. People practically
worshiped it. Where
I grew up, it put food on the table. Cotton was more up
and down, but
tobacco provided financial stability, not just for
farmers but for the whole
community. My family grew tobacco, sold fertilizer and
seed, and managed
a tobacco auction. It was our whole world.
You have had a successful career as a lawyer and an
Air Force
Captain before that. What prompted you to pursue writing fiction?
I always had the idea for this particular story in my
head. The 1950s and
1960s were two decades that changed the world, and a farm
with
sharecroppers is a bit of a pressure cooker environment.
You have the
farm owner’s family – in many cases people of wealth and
entitlement –
living just down the driveway from the sharecropping
families. The
sharecroppers were poor and had limited options, so they
felt stuck living
on a farm that didn’t belong to them doing backbreaking
work with no way
out. It’s a situation that lends itself to drama:
families with major differences
in class/race/socioeconomic status living in such close
proximity to one
another.
How has the landscape of tobacco farming changed, and
how did you
incorporate those changes into the plot of “Talmadge
Farm?”
Probably the biggest change was the shift from
sharecropping to migrant
workers. Today, tobacco farmers are large corporations
that use migrant
workers as laborers. But in the 1950s, farming relied
almost completely on
sharecropping, which was a hard life. Tobacco farming is
physically
demanding work, and sharecroppers needed the help of all
family members
to complete the various steps – planting, seeding,
suckering, priming,
worming, and cropping – of harvesting the crop.
Sharecroppers at one farm
would help sharecroppers at the neighboring farm because
they did not
have the resources to hire extra people. In the 1950s,
sharecroppers were
unable to get credit anywhere but at the general store
and maybe the feed
store. They truly lived hand to mouth all the time, only
able to pay their
debts after the tobacco auction in the fall. Hence the
phrase “sold my soul
to the company store.” Sharecroppers often turned to
moonshining as a
way to make extra money.
As I describe in the novel, sharecropping began to
disappear in the 1960s
as children of sharecroppers started taking advantage of
new opportunities
that the changing society offered. Migrant workers took
over the labor of
farming. In addition to labor changes, new machinery
improved the
industry. N.C. State was instrumental in developing
advances in the
farming world. Legislation changed and farmers were
allowed to have
acreage allotments outside of the land they owned. I
touch on all of these
changes in the novel.
Are any of the characters in your book based on real
people?
Not really. The closest characters to real people in my
life are the
characters of Jake and Bobby Lee. Jake is a Black
teenager who wants to
escape farm life and ends up running away to Philadelphia
to become a
success. Bobby Lee is a young Black soldier stationed at
Fort Bragg. On
the farm where I grew up, there was a Black sharecropping
family with four
sons, the youngest of whom was my age. We were very good
friends. All of
the boys were bright and athletic, could fix anything,
yet were limited in
their opportunities. They didn’t have a school to go to
or a job to look
forward to. Their only options were to stay on the farm
or join the army. The
character of Gordon, while not based on any one person,
reminds me of a
lot of men I knew who did not treat women well, who were
racist, who
enjoyed the status quo and were resistant to anything
that threatened their
way of life.
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In addition to the changing tobacco farming
methodologies, the 1950s
ushered in a period of profound social change, marked
notably by the
introduction of credit cards. How did these outside
factors impact
farming, and in what ways did they inform the
development of the plot
in “Talmadge Farm?”
In the novel, Gordon is the president of the local bank,
yet he resists the
advances in the banking industry, including credit cards
and car loans and
the incursion of national banks into rural communities.
Gordon’s father, who
founded the bank, was a brilliant man adept at navigating
the bank through
changing times, but Gordon simply doesn’t have the smarts
to see what’s
coming, and no one can get through to him. He’d rather
play a round of golf
than look at the balance sheet. So between the changing
farming
landscape and the evolution of new banking practices,
Gordon is getting
squeezed from both sides of the ledger as it were. It
proves to be his
downfall. I think that’s one of the great strengths of
the plot – how
everything is tied to everything else.
How did other social changes – including race
relations – impact the
tobacco industry and your writing?
In the 1960s, the minority labor pool available to farm
tobacco began to dry
up as kids started moving up north or joining the army.
We see this in the
novel through the characters of Jake and Bobby Lee. Ella
is another
example. She’s the Black teenage daughter of a
sharecropping family, and
she hates farm work. She ends up enrolling in a
secretarial program and
getting a job at the county clerk’s office, opportunities
that were unheard of
in the 1950s.
The Surgeon General issued a groundbreaking report 60
years ago on
the harmful effects of smoking. How did this pivotal
moment influence
your approach to writing? What firsthand impacts did
you observe
while coming of age among the tobacco farms of North
Carolina?
Most people where I lived didn’t believe the Surgeon
General was accurate
in that report. Most everyone smoked. People viewed it as
the government
coming in and trying to tell us what to do. A prevailing
theme was that the
government was trying to get rid of tobacco but wasn’t
doing anything
about alcohol. One notable exception I remember is that
good athletes in
the 1950s were discouraged from smoking, so maybe the
coaches were on
to something that the rest of us weren’t ready to hear
yet. In the novel, we
see Gordon’s constant frustration at what he views as
interference from the
government, while other characters, mostly ones involved
in the medical
community, begin to appreciate that smoking was bad for
one’s health.
How did you address the plight of women in the novel?
In the 1950s, women were very limited in their
opportunities. There were
very few professional opportunities for women outside of
teaching, nursing,
and working as a secretary. Divorce was scandalous and
unheard of in
those days. We see lots of examples of this in the novel.
But of all the
characters, it’s two of the women who have the clearest
moral compasses:
Claire, Gordon’s wife, and Ivy, the Talmadges’ maid. Both
of them see
more clearly than anyone else where Gordon is going off
the deep end, but
they are nearly powerless to do anything about it.
The novel touches on themes of privilege, racial
injustice, and the
struggle for autonomy and dignity. How did you
navigate these
sensitive topics while crafting the narrative, and
what challenges did
you encounter along the way?
I lived through this time, and I witnessed first-hand
people who enjoyed
privilege that was unearned as well as racial injustices
that denied Black
people access to the same opportunities as white people.
And yet most
people – white and Black – were simply striving to make a
better life in an
honorable way. I tried to infuse all of the characters in
“Talmadge Farm”
with dignity and humanity, even Gordon, who finally gets
his comeuppance
in the end.
The novel is described as a "love letter to the
American South." Can
you expand on this sentiment?
As I look back on my childhood, in many ways it was a
wonderful time to
grow up. It was safe. We never locked our doors. Our
whole life existed just
in that area; it was a long trip traveling to Raleigh,
which was only 60
minutes away. There was a strong sense of community, of
church, of taking care of each other
Ultimately, what do you hope readers will take away
from “Talmadge
Farm?”
I mainly hope they will be entertained by a great story
about three families
who called Talmadge Farm home during the tumultuous times
of the
1950s-1960s.
What impact do you aspire for the book to have on
discussions about
history, identity, and resilience in the American
South?
We have now moved on from the post-Civil War time and the
Jim Crow
period to a place where we’re beginning to find our
identity as a state and
region. In the 1950s, North Carolina was one of the
poorest states in the
country. Our economy was dependent primarily on tobacco
farming but
also textiles and furniture making, none of which paid a living wage.
Segregation was rampant, and minorities had few
opportunities to improve
their lot in life. Our university graduates who studied
computer science and
technology ended up leaving the state to find jobs in
those industries. That
all began to change in the 1960s with the enforcement of
desegregation,
the advent of birth control, and changes in farming
regulations and
methods.
Another major turning point in our state’s economy was
when
Governor Hodges convinced IBM to move from New York to
North Carolina
as part of the development of the Research Triangle Park.
A large number
of technology and pharmaceutical companies followed suit,
and there was
a ripple effect that extended across the state, even to
areas like Hobbsfield,
our fictional town in “Talmadge Farm.” My hope is that
reading this novel
will help people understand how we got to where we are
today.
via Celtic Lady
