The Last Witness from a Dirt Road

A moving coming-of-age story, written, possibly by one of the last of Southerners to grow up on a working sugar plantion. Told through the eyes and voice of the young son of the white overseer, this is a unique and heartfelt remembrance of events past, and a portrait of a time and place on the cusp of dramatic change. It's the 1940s and Billy lives on Shirley Plantation near the small town of Bunkie, Louisiana. Effortlessly, he moves back and forth across the lines of segregation, while navigating a whites-only life at church and school, then returns to the lively black community on the plantation. But slowly, surely, he begins to lose his childhood innocence, at the same time, he sees the different way which society treats whites and blacks. Mag, a black woman who is like a second mother, is forced to leave the plantation when she looses her field-worker man to a younger woman. From that day on, her empty hosue in the workers' Quarters is a reminder of how fast everything is changing in his small world, which he loves. A rare snowstorm on Thanksgiving Day brings out the difference between his life in the "Big House," to the life lived by the plantation workers in the row of small houses along the dirt road. Billy struggles to find meanings in their lives, and bridge the separation between his life and lives of the black workers as best he can. While this way of life has faded into history, his memories of that life have not. A stunning portrait of life in a unique era that will never be again, eloquently told by a man who lived it.