Effie and Her Friends: A Story of Friendship

Effie and Her Friends is a historical fiction novel set in South Alabama in the ‘40s and '50s. The story is about the growing friendship between a girl and a boy, a black and a white, a child of a tenant farmer and a child of an owner; my childhood experiences from my adult’s perspective. It is a friendship that quietly, yet openly, teaches personal Christian values such as respecting differences, personal self-worth and value, sharing, kindness, and empathy. Some parts of the story are told as they actually occurred and others as a small boy wished them to be.

The characters in the story come directly from the farm that my dad owned and where Effie’s dad lived and worked. The book is about what was not right in my childhood that I could make right in my adulthood as I changed what was into what could have been. In going home again by rewriting my memories, Effie walked out of the shadows of the woods into the open sunlight of the verdant, green meadow that lay beside her house and in front of mine. In sharing her, both she and I are alive in a new and different way.