Synopsis

In the small Southern town of New Harmony, history is not something distant or abstract. It lives in front porches, church pews, family kitchens, and in the quiet lessons passed from mother to child. Margaret grows up learning the unspoken rules of the Jim Crow South, carrying both the weight of those boundaries and the fierce love of a close-knit community.

As she steps into motherhood, her world centers on protecting what she has built. But when the murder of her son tears through her family, the fragile balance between faith and grief begins to shift. Forced to confront unbearable loss, Margaret turns toward memory, storytelling, and the people who refuse to let her stand alone.

Spanning the early to mid-twentieth century, this historical novel offers an intimate portrait of one woman’s endurance within a divided society. Reflective and emotionally grounded, it explores motherhood, cultural inheritance, and the quiet strength required to survive — and to remember.

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Excerpt

TWO

Pappy’s Gal

I heard my mammy yellin’ clean ’cross that field, but I ain’t say one word, nuthin’ at all. I sat right still, like that walkin’ stick bug I seen yestiddy, hidin’ on some tree bark.

Mammy yelled again.

“Margaret!”

By then, I saw her ’vancing ’round that big old oak tree.

She was full of wind and festooned with shiny beads of water on her forehead. They dribbled into false tears that streaked her face and sparkled in the sunlight.

She’d been in the sun picking tobacco since dawn, and her eyes flashed a warning when she said, “Gal, yuh gots sump’em crammed in them ears of yourn?”

She acted like she could’ve wrung my neck like Tom, the rooster who scratched past me in the yard. It was rare for her to raise her voice or rumble with anger. Rather, her voice, by its nature and her temperament, forced itself to flutter like the arched winds of a hen striving to shoo her clutch, gathering her chicks into her protection. But she picked up some more wind and blew, “Gal, yuh ain’t hear me callin’ yuh?”

I still hunched down behind the cabin, trying mighty hard to pretend I wasn’t there, but Mammy’s footsteps assaulted the broom-swept yard and puffed a flurry of dust in my direction, and she said, “Git up from there! Child, you’s the laziest thang I ever did see.”

I was never sassy, but I was right good at pouting, though. Besides, the switch taught me what it meant to be unladylike.

Her feet carried her only a little ways before she pulled up to ask, “Whut’s the matter, baby?”

“Mammy, it be’s too hot. The sun gonna turn me in’tuh uh tar baby.”

“Gal, yuh gots a long ways ’foe you’s uh tar baby. Quit yo’ fussin’, git off yo’ tail, and go on yonder and give yo’ pappy and the boys a drank of water. Tar baby, my foot! . . . Margaret Long, yuh’s almos’ white.”

I pouted so that my bottom lip was way bigger than the top one, and I changed the subject and said, “Mammy, Fannie ain’t done nuthin’ all day.”

She stared at me, and with her eyes wide in disbelief and her fist firmly planted in the natural curve of her hourglass figure, she said, “Fannie in the house wid baby girl.”

But before I could stop myself, “Ain’t Lena ’sleep?” flung out my mouth.

“Quit axin’ so many questions. Jest does whut I axes yuh, gal. Git on up, and don’tcha be movin’ like molasses, neither. Pappy and the boys hankerin’ for sump’tem tuh drank. Yuh hear me?”

“Yessum.”

Mammy walked toward the house to check on Lena and Fannie. Before the screen door blurred her silhouette, she removed the wrap that covered her head, and her raven-silk hair whisked at her shoulders. Mammy’s hair once reached the middle of her back, but she’d cut it short. It had reached a point of being in-between, neither long nor short, but magnificent all the same.

Folks said I resembled Mammy when she was ten. I was thin, high in color, and had long, slender fingers like hers. Her eyes were brown, but mine held the hue of ripened hazelnuts mixed with green, brown, and gold that shifted in the sunlight from a nutty brown to a lighter brownish-green. But what I liked more than anything else was Mammy’s long eyelashes and her dark, thick eyebrows. With the flutter of those lashes and the arch of one brow, Mammy spoke volumes. She was short, and folks said I’d take after her.

Lula was Mammy’s name, but her beauty and presence should’ve been granted a more regal name. She was the prettiest woman I knew, but I was the second.

Mammy noticed my rapt gaze and shooed me up with “Gal, move yo’ tail!”

Well, it took a mighty hefty thing to rouse me from my hidey hole, ’cause I hated summer as much as a snowman did. Summer meant field work, more housework, and caring for the young ones in the sweltering Carolina heat.

I despised all of it.

About the Author

Leon E. Pettiway, Ph.D., is Professor Emeritus at Indiana University, Bloomington, where his scholarship focused on race, environment, and criminal justice in urban America. Over the course of his academic career, he examined how structural inequality shapes lived experience and social outcomes. In later years, his work expanded to explore how Eastern and Western philosophical traditions might inform conversations about justice and morality. A fully ordained Buddhist monk in the Gelug tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, he now devotes his time to spiritual practice, teaching, and writing. New Harmony: A Mother’s Story of Love and Loss is his debut novel.

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