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.”
View John Grimsrud's page on AmazonLink to Sailing the Sea Islands:
https://www.amazon.com/Sailing-Sea-Islands-Travels-Dursmirg-ebook/dp/B009438L96?ref_=ast_author_dp_rw&th=1&psc=1&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.0BOlEhsBG_fvQ48GrUY8SBKqrmR_q60hk665lya9x_PRYGwkLFzh1qD_cjBwnnuuXQZ_UgLzThWQoo9hwY1nufcYIyzYrYe5u7pWy9QbxFQ9FhhLnVW5hLDyOZv9Uos2pQ8JRw0rEuDkcM2a3KnllfsU47XirezwKoOAZV9QE7Y.SbZv87BnmllnHA2Bnp8zSQyxTzSGZryZvUUsOpkqxtY&dib_tag=AUTHOR
