Ordinary people, extraordinary lives. These are true stories of the Strouds, eight siblings born into rural poverty in Emanuel County, Georgia at the turn of the 20th century. Surviving a childhood of hard work, deprivation, and sparse expectations, they followed different paths in their separate quests for security or survival. None occupied a high public office, amassed a fortune, starred in movies, or discovered the cure for a disease. They occasionally crossed paths with the famous but rarely attracted attention beyond their small circles of family, friends, and acquaintances.
Yet drama filled their lives. Most of them knew squalor or tragedy or both. Some displayed incomparable strength of character and achieved modest triumphs under exceptionally trying circumstances. Others surrendered to alcoholism or despair. Their combined experiences included death in childbirth, murder, the loss of an only child, suicide, railroad strikes, sharecropping, the revival of Ku Klux Klan, migration to jobs in Northern factories, the settlement of Southern Florida, the hurricane of 1928, work for the Tennessee Valley Authority, and building Liberty Ships. As the collective memory of a generation is lost, these stories pay homage to ordinary but complex men and women who demonstrated courage daily and who usually, but not always, remained true to their better natures. To know their lives is to understand an essential part of the great changes that have transformed the South and the nation.
"There's no finer memorial to one's kinfolk than an account of their lives that people with no connection to them can read with pleasure and profit. The Strouds are an interesting bunch, and Seckinger makes the most of that. Moreover, situating them in their time and place casts light on the dramatic social and economic changes that swept over the twentieth-century South. Seckinger handles a large cast of characters adroitly and his prose is a delight to read." -- John Shelton Reed, author of 1001 Things Everyone Should Know about the South