BOOK REVIEW: FIVE STARS
Praying for Sheetrock: A Work of Nonfiction by Melissa Greene Fey
“From
award-winning author and journalist Melissa Fay Greene, Praying for
Sheetrock is the story of McIntosh County, a small, isolated, and
lovely place on the flowery coast of Georgia—and a county where, in
the 1970s, the white sheriff—Tom Poppell—still wielded all the
power, controlling everything and everybody. Somehow the sweeping
changes of the civil rights movement managed to bypass McIntosh
entirely.
It took one uneducated, unemployed black man, Thurnell
Alston, to challenge the sheriff and his courthouse gang—and to
change the way of life in this community forever.” quote from
Amazon.com
My wife Jane and I actually tried to buy waterfront property in the area of McIntosh County back in the day. We loved the place but after exhaustive exploration and investigation found out that outsiders were not welcome.
We wrote about McIntosh County, Georgia, in Sailing The Sea Islands set in the era of Pat Conroy and his monumental book, The Water is Wide, that was about Daufuskie Island and had the names changed to protect the guilty.
We were there too and amazingly watched history evolve.
EXCERPTS:
The civil rights movement is told like a litany at times, as if well-anticipated goals were achieved in a series of distinct and strategic skirmishes: Montgomery, Little Rock, Greensboro, Albany. But it happened in McIntosh County, too.
Whether you see the place as a footnote or as the front lines, it happened here, too.
According to their inner moral compasses—one must drop down to the level of the sidewalks, kitchens, and backyards. What were people saying? Who was saying what? How did their own histories, biases, and perceptions inspire them? And why did an epoch of social change play differently here than in New York or Detroit, Atlanta or Memphis, or in the small county up the road?
Large and important things happening in a very little place. It is about the end of the good old boy era and the rise of civil rights, and what that famous epoch looked like, sounded like, smelled like, and felt like in a Georgia backwater in the 1970s.
For fifty years before the construction of modern Interstate 95, on the east coast, old U.S. 17 through McIntosh County was the northerners’ main route to Florida. Traffic, even in the middle of the night, was fast and constant.
“It was the spirit of fleecing the Yankees that was tolerated by even the law-abiding citizens, I suppose,” said Woody Hunter, dean of the Emory University Law School and a former resident of McIntosh. “Tom Poppell was Billy the Kid. He was Robin Hood.”
“We had the postwar South, the poorest-of-the-poor South right here in McIntosh County. It was the dirt-poor type of people swarmed the place like ants, and Tom wasn’t about to stop anybody from getting a pair of shoes.”
The court system is full of all sorts of little junk, but back then the sheriff was judge, jury, and monarch. He’d help a young man out of trouble the first time. But then a lot of people he flat run out of the county because they wouldn’t abide by his law.
In 1971, Tom Poppell was a dinosaur, the last of his kind. Statewide observers called him “the last of the old-time political bosses in Georgia.”
Georgia State Troopers, Georgia Bureau of Investigation agents, FBI agents, DEA agents, and U.S. Customs agents up and down the southern coast all agreed with the words of a Brunswick police detective: “The only crime that existed in McIntosh County was Tom Poppell’s. He was the last of the great old-time High Sheriffs.”
The people here were just happy with nothing. It was a plantation mentality. The sheriff was running this county just like an old plantation.”
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