Crossing Bully Creek

In Crossing Bully Creek, acclaimed author Margaret Erhart employs an eclectic array of well-drawn characters to chronicle the sometimes torrential swiftness, sometimes trickling slowness of change through the generations. At the story’s heart is Henry Detroit, owner of Longbrow Plantation, now on his deathbed as the 1960s come to a close. Around him swirl servants, retainers, workers, and family, all gathered to preside over the death of life as they know it in the South.

The book moves back and forth between the 1920s and 1960s, revealing each character’s story through fragments of memory, conversation, or action, each episode evoking a vision of mists parting on a South that resists nearly all outside influences and efforts to change. From Henry’s wife, Rowena (a descendant of William Tecumseh Sherman), to the servant Rutha, from his saucy granddaughter to the man running the plantation for his son, characters black and white and in-between move through a time when old traditions linger, yet begin to give way—subtly transformed through the small, determined acts of a few individuals.