Beschrijving

A firsthand look at a not-so-long ago era in American history by an author who lived its pages — join Katie Jane Taylor and Ardella, the housekeeper, as together their families weather illness, hardship, hatred and prejudice — all in a town where blacks and whites didn’t mix. Early rumblings of the Civil Rights Movement shook many towns across the south in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and in Separate Fountains, author Patti Wilson Byars shows that her hometown of Jonesboro, Georgia was not excluded. Jonesboro reflected the typical sleepy, little southern town of that era — where bigotry, along with the magnolias, was in full bloom.Georgia’s red clay roads led into Jonesboro where soda fountains enticed children out of the hot sun. But, that same red clay also stained neighbors’ shoes that stuck out from underneath white robes. The dichotomy of the ideal and the unjust could be found in picturesque Jonesboro — as it could in most any other Southern town. In Separate Fountains, twelve year old Katie Jane Taylor questions the social issues of the south of the 1940s and 1950s as her beloved black housekeeper, Ardella, has to drink from a water fountain marked \