A Young White Boy’s Remembrances of a Bygone Plantation Era Revealed in New Book

One of the last white Southerners to grow up on a plantation now tells his tale in The Last Witness From A Dirt Road: A Fictionalized Memoir by Bill Hunt.

Athens, AL (PRWEB) February 19, 2006 -- This moving coming-of-age story written by the white son of a plantation overseer gives a unique portrait of a time and place on the cusp of dramatic change.

In the 1940s, eleven-year-old Billy lives on Shirley plantation near the small town of Bunkie, Louisiana. Effortlessly, he moves back and forth across the lines of segregation, navigating a whites-only life at church and school with the close black-community setting of the plantation, where most of his life is spent.

Billy loves the plantation as it is, but slowly, he begins to realize the effects of segregation and suppression, and at the same time, he begins to lose his childhood innocence. Mag, the black woman who cooked and worked in the “Big House” since Billy was born, is forced to leave the plantation when she looses her man to a younger woman. A rare snowstorm on Thanksgiving Day was the first realization to Billy, of the vast social and economic differences between his family’s life in the “Big House” to the field hands whose lives were spent in the row of small houses in the Quarters. Billy witnesses the hardships along the dirt road, and realizes that the world around him was changing faster than he wanted, but as a white kid, he had choices, which he knew he must make. And while he would never forget the injustices he witnesses, he knows the friends on the dirt road and the relationships which developed as their lives intertwined, would always be a part of him.

A stunning portrait of life in a bygone era, eloquently told by a man who lived it.

About the author:
Bill Hunt was born to sharecropper parents in Avoyelles Parish, Louisiana. In the mid 1930s his father became the overseer of a large sugarcane plantation and the family moved into a black-community setting. Hunt received an Accounting Degree in 1956 from the University of Louisiana Lafayette. A few months later, he entered the military, where he worked in Army Finance in Washington state and Alaska. He retired from his profession in health care administration in 1991 and began to write about his past. Proceeds will be donated to Bill Hunt’s hometown, Bunkie, in Louisiana as seed money to develop a Boys and Girls Club. He lives with his wife Grace in Athens, Alabama, near to their four children and nine grandchildren.

For more information, or for a free review copy, please contact the author at bunkyboy@pclnet.net. The Last Witness From A Dirt Road: A Fictionalized Memoir is available for sale online at Amazon.com, Borders.com, BookSurge.com, and through additional wholesale and retail channels worldwide.

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