From White Sand to Red Clay

Mary Margaret Knight was born in Charleston, South Carolina, the survivor of a twin birth that left her with a broken-mirror life tainted with anguish and heartbreak. Raised by a polio-handicapped, alcoholic, violent father and a mother stricken with sleeping sickness, she and her sister, Nora, became street survivors until the Child Welfare Bureau placed them in a Catholic orphanage in Charleston...only to be raised and abused by the Sisters of Charity. After five years the girls were released and returned to their ever-angry father and inwardly declining mother.

Mary Margaret escaped at age 17 after a five-day courtship and wedding to a Georgia farm-boy-turned-soldier. Ten years and six babies later, he decided to return to his roots in the red hills of Georgia, where she found herself plucking chickens, killing hogs, confronted by enraged roosters, creek leeches, venomous snakes, and a forbidding husband who was no less ill-tempered.

In 1950s rural Georgia, whether living in a small town or on a farm, Mary Margaret was always voiceless and powerless, a master of the art of obedience, a victim of the seclusion and discontent of being housebound by her despotic husband. Her life became defined by place-memories of a field, a room, a house, a religious conversion, a town misfit, a city tragedy, a dead child. Aside from her family, other people were superfluous. Her focus was on her children and little else.

This powerful and compelling memoir is a compilation of a son's recollections of his mother's vivid and poignant stories, those of an intrepid Southern woman who survived the Great Depression, World War II, and post-war poverty. It is a story of survival, a lesson in seeing the positive when all around is threatening, and a tribute to one woman's hidden strength.