The Garden Club

Fate, I suppose, together with an unexpected phone call, led me to become the CEO of the Garden Club in Natchez, Mississippi, where I served for five years. This book was conceived and born out of my experiences in that position, and is woven from my imagination, coupled with first and second-hand accounts of many events which I have depicted, as well as my study of records and archives dating back prior to the Civil War. Natchez is famous for its mansions, and this book is about the people who inhabit those mansions, just as their ancestors did a hundred years ago. It is also about the beautiful but delicate balance of love and friendship which has evolved between black and white and which has survived in this tiny town from the days of master and slave. It is also the story of Rod Farshall, a young man who is caught up and swept into a terrifying series of events which will change his life forever, and it is my version of the happenings leading up to and encompassing the incineration of one of the greatest homes in the city, and how the resulting actions of the Garden Club set the stage for brutal and unconscionable retaliation from a prominent Natchez citizen. But more than all of the above, it is a story of how a few women conceived and developed The Sojourner Garden Club and then wielded its gavel to obtain their one and only goal, power.