Though the townsfolk give way to a mindless idolization, the Gospel Singer is tormented by the extent of his deception and is forced to admit his corrupt activities.

    There he encounters conflict with the overseer, Sidney Bonbon, and a tale of revenge, lust and power plays out between Marcus, Bonbon, Bonbon's mistress Pauline, and Bonbon's wife Louise.

    Southern Tradition at Bay

    The Cotton Patch Version is a very colloquial, southern translation.

    The Least One, published originally in 1967, portrays a white sharecropping family during the Great Depression and is based on Borden Deal’s experiences growing up on a small farm in northeastern Mississippi. “My own memory produced a flood of material,” said the author. “I remembered the loss of the farm, the day the sheriff had come to dispossess us; I remembered picking blackberries and selling them in town for a dime a bucket; I remembered the hope and promise of a government mule.”The story is told through the voice of a twelve-year-old, significantly called Boy Sword, and is set in a fictitious community that suggests the area of Cullman, Alabama. Deal portrays the realities of cotton-field work: planting, chopping, the laying-by time, and harvesting. He succeeds in evoking not only the crushing economic circumstances of poor Southern whites in that period but also their fierce sense of independence and self-sufficiency.

    The demand for reprints of perennial favorites or early, hard-to-find dishes prompted Mrs. Dull to compile them into her now-famous book. Not only does it include individual recipes, but it also suggests menus for various occasions and holidays. Her famous Georgia Christmas Dinner, for instance, consists of grapefruit, roast turkey, dry stuffing, dry rice, turkey gravy, candied sweet potatoes, buttered green peas, cranberry jelly, celery hearts, hot biscuits, sweet butter, syllabub, and cake.Mrs. Dull was one of the most sought-after caterers in Atlanta even before she began her newspaper column. Her vast, practical knowledge of food and its preparation, and her embrace of new, but never gimmicky, innovations in cooking served her readers well. Upon Mrs. Dull's death in 1964 at the age of 100, the Atlanta Journal said that her book was "the standard by which regional cooks have been measured since 1928." Southern Cooking is the starting place for anyone in search of authentic dishes done in the traditional style.

    Set in the Smoky Mountains of East Tennessee and covering a span of family history from the Civil War to 1940, these tales achieve the forceful, intractable simplicity of the traditional ballads. But one also finds in these twenty-three stories an overview of the forces of nature, the paradoxes inherent in the human condition, and a full acceptance of the real world and the supernatural.Born to the milieu about which she wrote, Mildred Haun recorded a world which combined stark natural phenomena and passionate supernatural forces. And because the supernatural is woven into the dramatic fabric of the stories, it contributes, paradoxically, to the final credibility of events.Few writers in the twentieth century have set down so rich and complex a rendering of folk tradition and such a comprehensive treatment of superstition in the southern Appalachians. In these tales we meet a talking apple tree, a boy with the "hant bleach" of doom upon his brow, a bleeding ghost, a child's winding sheet wet with tears, and God's revelation in a blue bird.No other dialect collection from the South has been as close to the oral tradition or has achieved the same distinctive flavor and natural tonal qualities. The speech strikes the ear directly from the printed page. The language is simple and strong. A sparse, direct economy prevails. The total impact is explosive.Although Miss Haun dramatized themes of cruelty, revenge, and the loss of personal dignity in a harsh world, the comic tales in this volume call to mind the Native American humor of the Old Southwest and demonstrate that a female humorist, without coyness or bawdry, can hold her own alongside Davy Crockett, Sut Lovingood, and the nameless spinners of tall tales.