Tracing the trilogy.

During the fourth or fifth revision of my children's book The Secret of Gumbo Grove - around 1984 or 1985 - my extraordinarily patient editor Jeanne Vestal at Franklin Watts crossed out yet another passage of my precious prose and tactfully explained, "You can't put the whole history of Black America into this one book, Eleanora. You're telling the story of just one little girl." Jeanne was right. What I had to tell wouldn't fit into one book, so after the publication of The Secret of Gumbo Grove (Watts, 1987), I wrote two more - Thank You, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.! (Watts, 1990), and A Blessing in Disguise (Delacorte, 1995). The three became my "Carolina Trilogy." I spent most of my fourteen years (1978-1992) of living in Myrtle Beach (Horry County), South Carolina, writing these slices of realistic adolescent fiction about some very special African American girls, their families, and their neighborhoods in the coastal Carolina Low Country as my way of acquainting readers in print with what I was blessed to experience in reality.

My writing room and our front porch on Carver Street located in the main African American neighborhood of Myrtle Beach became a window into a state whose heritage of exciting, evolving, and often turbulent African American struggle is evidenced not necessarily through the physical and rhetorical "plantations" found on almost every corner in the region, but more through the evidence of things not seen. Felt instead, from boneside out. What I saw and experienced in Myrtle Beach and Horry County - with its contrasting beer-guzzling, golf-crazy, yellow-shirt-and-green-pant-wearing, bikini-biker-beach resort-attracting, plat-eye ghost-roaming, millionaire and poverty-stricken, overalls- to swimsuit-wearing, tobacco-chewing, snuff-dipping, Gullah-speaking, roots- and hoodoo-working, fight-for-the-Confederate flag-till-you-die-evoking, pageant-prancing, ancestor-worshiping lifestyles - went straight into the books. I didn't have to make what I wrote larger than life, in other words.

All I had to do for The Secret of Gumbo Grove was create a strong sense of place in a mythical "Calvary" County, South Carolina, to collect obscure history, develop full-fledged characters, particularly strong-willed Raisin Stackhouse (who'd probably be a rocket scientist by now), and then transform these observations, emotions, personalities, and research into a meaningful dialogue with the reader. That alone took me seven years.

Having done that, writing the second and third books was easier, because they take place in the same county. All I needed to do then was give voices to their heroines, Mary Elouise Avery in Thank You, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.! and Zambia Brown of "itsy-bitsy, do-nothin', countrified" Deacons Neck, South Carolina, in A Blessing in Disguise. An American Bookseller "Pick of the Lists," A Blessing in Disguise is "a timely book that speaks to the subject of drugs and crime in a rural Southern town," wrote School Library Journal, "and a valuable addition to most collections." The ALA Booklist called Thank You, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.! "clear-eyed and accessible," and it was named a National Council for the Social Studies-Children's Book Council Notable Children's Book. Kirkus gave The Secret of Gumbo Grove a "pointer" and called it "a slice of Americana that would be widely enjoyed." Gumbo Grove received a Parents' Choice Gold Seal award, was featured on National Public Radio's All Things Considered, and remains on state children's book recommended reading lists. Both Gumbo Grove and Thank You, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.! are under contract to be made into audiotapes by Recorded Books, Inc.

I've tried to offer a body of work that brings northeast coastal South Carolina into a finer perspective for both young and young-at-heart readers everywhere. If nothing else, the collection might in some way nullify the claim expressed years ago to me during my initial research - which I have Raisin's teacher tell her - "that nobody Black around here had ever done anything good worth talking about" (Secret 16).

Over the years children have sent me scads of letters about these books. They relate to eleven-year-old Raisin's efforts to collect her family's and local Black history and save her church's neglected cemetery. These readers also understand Mary Elouise's anguish over friendships and the undeserved shame she feels about her dark brown skin color and kinky hair. And many know what drugs and crime can do to families when they inundate neighborhoods like drugs and crime do in Zambia's.

Elementary and middle school teachers use Gumbo Grove in their classrooms not only as enjoyable reading material, but also to stimulate students into becoming more interested in their own neighborhoods and communities. Many other educators and librarians have developed innovative and enjoyable lesson plans across the curriculum using The Secret of Gumbo Grove and Thank You, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.! After they passed their projects on to me, I developed a teacher's guide for the books. More recently, media specialist Pat Scales of Greenville, South Carolina, developed one for A Blessing in Disguise that can be downloaded from Bantam Doubleday Dell's website for teachers (www.bdd.com/teachers).

The genesis of the work - the trail of the trilogy - began at 5:30 a.m. on July 17, 1978, when my U.S. Air Force husband Zack Hamlett, III, and I and our daughter Gretchen moved to Myrtle Beach from Jackson, Tennessee. Myrtle Beach Air Force Base would be his first - and last - place of duty. We rolled into the driveway of the Myrtle Beach duplex that would be our off-base rented home until we built a house a few years later on nearby Carver Street. I stepped out onto the coquina driveway in the dew-wet dawn. Across the street the sun was barely reaching over the roof of the nightclub that would become one of my prototypes for Mr. Eseau's Gumbo Limbo Soda Fountain and Cafe in Gumbo Grove and for Vernon "Snake" LaRange's Studio Paradise nightclub in A Blessing in Disguise.

On that pivotal morning, I saw an empty, two-story, tumbling-down apartment building behind the duplex. The thick, pungent July morning and the fog that lifted from the grass near the old building seemed to be spirits reaching out to me. In my eagerness to know the history of this community, I imagined I heard voices rising from that sandy soil. I thought the acrid smell was from the sea, or certainly the salt marshes.

Some folks later said, though, that the "smell" I detected was not salt marshes or the sea, but the sour, spoiled-sauerkraut stench of sawmills wafting up from adjoining Georgetown County (you don't smell this anymore). They added that the "voices" and the fog could have been the moans and vestiges of a plat-eyed ghost. Plat-eyed ghost? I knew then that I would have to write about this land, those voices, and ole plat-eye.

So I began my research. I knew there was a positive Black history in the county because the whole state has a plethora of African and African American history. Africans and people of African descent had lived on the coast for over three hundred years. Slave ships came into port in Georgetown County, and smaller slave vessels had probably entered Horry County via the swampy Waccamaw River. Published histories told of Africans on board European explorers' ships that traveled close to the region as early as the 1500s. The Stono Rebellion of 1739 near Charleston; the Denmark Vesey insurrection in Charleston in 1822; Harriet Tubman's presence in and around Beaufort; the Civil War heroics of Black soldiers; the achievements of Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune, Dr. Benjamin Mays, and so many others - all pointed to this immense wealth of history.

But the children I talked with locally at the time didn't seem to know much about this wealth. Neither did other children (Black and white) that I met during my South Carolina creative writing residencies. They didn't know much history of their own town, their streets, or even their own families. Most local history at the time didn't get taught in elementary school classrooms unless an enterprising teacher took it upon herself or himself to do it.

My objective, then, was to look around me and ferret out real, everyday neighborhood heroes and heroines, to focus on local activities and landmarks, and to try to explain how they came to be using a "hook" that would resonate with kids everywhere. When my editor said that Raisin's searching for and uncovering clues was like a mystery ... ah ha! There was my hook.

I thought I had the skills to do the research for The Secret of Gumbo Grove. After all, I was a Drake University journalism graduate (1973), was a former reporter for the Des Moines (Iowa) Register and Tribune newspapers, was a former news editor of the African American weekly called the Iowa Bystander, and by 1980 had seen my first full-fledged children's book, Just an Overnight Guest, appear in print. I was a Bread Loaf Fellowship winner (1981); I had been toughened up by spending five weeks of travel and mayhem in Europe (1982); and by 1983 Zack and I were also running a tiny public relations company called Positive Images, Inc., which, among other activities, fed local stories to the Black press in the state and beyond.

When Black folks found out there was an African American woman in their community who wanted to hear about their lives and their accomplishments - after getting over the understandable initial shock, suspicion, and wonder if I was crazy - I got more than an earful. Their stories led me to the history of local African Americans who had been buried and neglected for so many decades. More importantly, they told me about a weedy old Myrtle Beach cemetery where many African Americans born just after the turn of the century rested. With the invaluable assistance of an elderly lady who used to help maintain that old cemetery with her associates, I began to research the stories of the people in the cemetery.

I listened and watched, researched, and wrote, preserving in print the stories, circumstances, tragedies, and humor of people who could be aptly described, in the words of biographer Dr. James Haskins, as the "undeservedly obscure" (Keynote address). As I also foraged in libraries (sometimes under the watchful eyes of librarians who didn't want me digging up such material) and courthouses, uncovering tiny shovelsful of what had been buried, my search inflamed my passions until it also became the major motivation that drove my character Raisin Stackhouse and made her come alive. In the meantime I wrote three news articles about the cemetery (along with countless others of Myrtle Beach and Horry County history) that the Charleston Chronicle African American newspaper published. These stories were picked up by other print media and went all over the country.

The personality of Raisin emerged from girls I met during my elementary school creative writing residencies in the heartland of South Carolina, and from a girl I'll call Keisha, who lived in Myrtle Beach in an extended family. Back in the 1980s I'd see Keisha walking to and from school with her school books and younger sisters. Keisha would always reply to my inquiry that "Yes," she loved to read - "kind of" - and "Yes," she was going to do fantastic things when she grew up. This all sounded so promising. She sounded so hopeful. I had such hopes for Keisha, as we all have for young girls starting through the maze of teenagehood.

My character Raisin wants to be a history teacher when she grows up, but nobody wants to tell her about the challenges she will face until Miz Effie, church secretary and widow of the Reverend Odell Pfluggins, former pastor of New Africa Number One Missionary Baptist Church, asks the girl to help her clean up the church's neglected cemetery. Raisin's own passion to find her family's and town's history enables the girl to push, leap, and sidestep the boundaries that her community's racial and social taboos have erected (and still do) around little Black girls. In the end, Raisin uncovers a bigger mystery when she finds that Gumbo Grove's founder and first mayor Alexander Morgan "Gumbo" Dickson is buried in that cemetery and in fact was an African American of great stature. She forces townspeople Black and white to realize that their community history involves residents of all ethnic groups, and not just one.

The praise for Gumbo Grove that tickled me was for its "authentic southern dialect." Much of the dialogue between Raisin and her friends Pooch, Big Boy, Junebug, Big Head, Bunny, Sin-Sin, and Raisin's younger sisters Maizell and Hattie came from young people I met during my elementary school residencies in Iowa (where the African American population is minuscule).

While living in Myrtle Beach during my writing of Gumbo Grove, I also witnessed the phenomenal growth of local African American "pageants," when elegantly attired little girls and boys in gowns and tuxedos (and their stunningly gorgeous older siblings) proudly paraded across public stages to win crowns, scholarships, and transistor radios. This was a spectacle that in Horry County had been traditionally all-white, or primarily left to Black churches for fund-raisers. When the all-Black Community Cultural Coalition of Myrtle Beach launched its first "Miss Black Grand Strand Pageant" at the Myrtle Beach Convention Center in 1983, and the Black History-Cultural Arts Association in Conway unveiled its "Miss Black Horry County Pageant," it was as if lightning had hit. The pageants electrified those Black communities. African American sororities, clubs, and other organizations suddenly were sponsoring pageants everywhere, and especially up and down the coast. Zack and I faithfully attended as many as feasible, and sent out stories and photos of the events to newspapers like the Baltimore Afro-to-American, which published the stories on its Carolina pages.

In this way I got up-close observations of what it was like for little Black girls to receive and respond to large-scale applause for their talents, their intelligence, and their beauty, regardless of skin shade. I culled the best of what I learned, and created my own "Miss Ebony Pageant" for Gumbo Grove's finale. In it Raisin Stackhouse wins an award for her historical and cemetery work. Hattie "places," and poor Mary Elouise bursts into tears and loses. But Mary Elouise would also get her own book - Thank You, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.!

And ole plat-eye? I found out that this is an old African American legend in which a "ghost" roams coastal swamps and marshes just as much as the Grand Strand's popular "Gray Man" and "Alice of the Hermitage" apparitions do. I heard a story about such a "sighting" from a young woman who had grown up around nearby Plantersville. She said she had seen "something white and shadowy" while walking home at night along a lonely dark dirt road out in the country. She also said that her husband on some nights was ridden by a "hant" and would wake up in bed to feel an invisible weight' so heavy on his chest that he could barely breathe.

Her stories made me curious, though not curious enough to walk down anybody's dark roads in rural South Carolina. I found references to a "plat-eye" in a few books, like Gonzales's The Black Border: Gullah Stories of the Carolina Coast, and in DuBose Heyward's short story "The Half Pint Flask." By asking questions, listening to more stories, and remembering how the hairs on my neck rose when I saw that old building behind our rented duplex back in 1978, I was able to piece together my own version of a plat-eyed ghost account that has helped it to come back to life, at least in literature. My version also gets some play in Haskins's The Headless Haunt and Other African American Ghost Stories, which devotes important space to the plat-eye's African and West Indian connections (see 107-08).

But despite the acclaim I received for Raisin's search for community and family identity, I still saw African American children who carried such strong feelings of insecurity about who they were and their place in their families and communities that they would hunch their shoulders and slide down in their seats at school when our discussions of Black folks, or even the mention of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., came up. Remembering my character Mary Elouise Avery and her feelings of shame during the Miss Ebony Pageant in Book One, I realized that she - and real-life children like her - had a story to tell, too.

Mary Elouise grew from a child I met during a writing residency I conducted at her school. This pretty, very dark-skinned girl wore her pressed hair in a plain pony tail and squinched down in her seat whenever I mentioned the word slavery as the class talked about Gumbo Grove. She didn't like to be called upon, wouldn't raise her hand, pretended not to listen to any of these discussions. The short story she subsequently wrote as part of my assignment to the class was about a character named "Ole Black Alice," and how ugly black skin was. Saddened by her story, I later took her aside, just as Miss Imani Afrika the storyteller does with Mary Elouise. The child told me that Black skin was ugly. I reminded her that she was dark-skinned, too, but she wasn't ugly, was she? She just shrugged.

During recess I noticed that she hung along the school building watching four little white girls play a hand-clapping game. I hardly ever saw her play with anyone else, except when school was out, when it was time for her to walk home. On the last day of my residency, the fourth girl in the hand-clapping circle was absent from school. My little friend rushed up to the three girls and was accepted into the game. She was so happy that her face almost split in two from grinning. This was her happy ending.

My fictional Mary Elouise is a fourth-grade remedial reader at Gumbo Grove Elementary School. She hates to have to read, partly because the words are so hard in her books. But much of the information and pictures in them are embarrassing, too. She slides down in her seat when the words slavery, Africa, or even the name Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. comes up. She dislikes her dark skin and kinky hair and wishes she could be more like her blonde-haired, blue-eyed, rich classmate Brandy, who she thinks is perfect. Brandy, who has her own exclusive circle of friends, thinks Mary Elouise is weird and a "geek" (remember "eek - a geek!"... ?) for trying to fondle her hair and sit beside her all the time.

Mary Elouise nearly abandons her long-time friend Hattie Stackhouse in her quest to win Brandy's friendship. She doesn't want the narrator part in the Black History segment of the President's Month play that her well-meaning but condescending teacher Miz Vereen has picked out for her, either. It takes a common-sense, loving grandmother named Big Momma, and a painful lesson about true friendship to wake Mary Elouise up, get her over being "colorstruck" about white people's skin color, and grow confident enough to strut her stuff with the best. The book is dedicated to grandmothers everywhere.

Recently, one young reader who couldn't wait until the end of the book for this transformation to occur shyly asked me, "Does Mary Elouise ever change?" When I told him yes, she realizes that she can be proud of being an African American, he breathed a huge sigh of relief.

The Secret of Gumbo Grove and Thank You, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.! celebrate neighborhoods, communities, and self-worth, but in A Blessing in Disguise I explore what happens to families when neighborhood responsibility and positive role modeling for youth wither under the weight of the perniciousness of hard drugs, crime, and greed to the point that the police, politicians, press, and yes, even some preachers and Civil Rights organizations look the other way. In real communities, the best Black leadership is that which doubles up its collective fist and drives the criminals out, or at least to another street somewhere else.

My character Zambia Renelda Brown is a twelve-year-old, tough little airhead who wants to be a fly girl in the rap videos. She has lived with her easygoing Aunt Limo, her hardworking Uncle Lamar, and her dull cousin Aretha in rural Deacons Neck since she was four years old. Old School parents and grandparents would call Zambia a "fast little ole thing" because she likes to hang out at night, shake her booty, scream at the boys, and watch the cars do doughnuts in the street.

Zambia craves the fast cars, flashy clothes, and what she thinks is the "glamorous" lifestyle of her drug-dealing, nightclub-owning father, Vernon "Snake" LaRange, who has another family and twin daughters in that fancy coastal resort, Gumbo Grove. Her alcoholic, AIDS-ridden mother loves Zambia, but can't take care of her because she's long been in a hospital. When Snake opens a nightclub on Zambia's own street, the child is thrilled because she thinks father and daughter can finally have the chance to get to know each other. But the nightclub's patrons bring drug traffic and crime with them to that once old, quiet street and condemnation of her father, who Zambia defends vigorously, to the chagrin of her drug-fighting uncle.

In her desperation to gain her father's attention and love, Zambia begins to roll down the same destructive path that he and her mother did when they were teenagers: Zambia and her new boyfriend Potsey scam a man in a fake drug deal. Just after Zambia finally realizes that she and her friends must break the pattern of wrongdoing and the "false glitter" of the streets if she and the neighborhood are to survive, Zambia is injured and her half-sister Seritta is killed in a drive-by shooting. During the ensuring neighborhood march led by Uncle Lamar and the family's energetic woman minister, Reverend Stoney Reed, Zambia finally understands that, though she'll continue to love her father, she doesn't have to love what he does - or do it, either.

Again I drew upon Keisha to flesh out the Zambia character, based on an incident that occurred one Sunday morning while I was out in my yard and heard a girl scream. Keisha rushed to the front of her house with one of her grown female relatives pursuing her. The relative struck her in the back several times, chased her around the house, knocked her down, hit her again, pulled Keisha to her feet, dragged her back inside the house, and there the screams continued.

I never found out what Keisha had done to receive the beating, but knowing the relative I figured she probably hadn't done much of anything wrong. After that I didn't see much of Keisha. Then she was in middle school, running with hard-faced, mean-eyed girls who kept cigarettes and foul language in their mouths. They hung around the hole-in-the-wall juke joints where old men used to sit, but where young men now had materialized and flagged down cars to make crack cocaine sales in the middle of the street, on the sidewalks, and even in people's yards. Next, Keisha's mother disappeared. Sometime after that, Keisha and a younger sister ran off, folks told me, in search of her. I never saw Keisha again.

These days when I return to where I used to live in Myrtle Beach, acquaintances tell me that the drug problem is not so bad as it used to be on this street, at least not right now. The old African American cemetery that I used as a prototype for The Secret of Gumbo Grove has been spruced up and is a local landmark now. Myrtle Beach school children have gone into it and made tombstone rubbings as class projects. Children write to me from around the country about how they can connect with Mary Elouise and friendship and skin color. Teachers around the country thank me for writing A Blessing in Disguise because of its female point of view, and also because they say their students see the same thing in their own neighborhoods.

I can't say, however, that what I wrote in my Carolina Trilogy made much difference in our neighborhoods and communities. But that wasn't really why I wrote the books. I wrote them to tell the stories of what it is that makes our communities what they are, from the past to the present, that will appeal to young readers, and that will give them hope.

Works Cited

Haskins, James. The Headless Haunt and Other African American Ghost Stories. New York: HarperCollins, 1994.

-----. Keynote address. Charlemae Rollins Colloquium. School of Library and Information Services, North Carolina Central U, Durham, NC. 13 Apr. 1996.

Tare, Eleanora E. The Secret of Gumbo Grove. New York: Watts, 1987.

Eleanora E. Tate is a children's book author, journalist, and author. She has written professionally for thirty-two years. Tare currently lives in Morehead City, North Carolina.