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1-878086-35-9
$19.95 hardcover
5 1/2 x 8
156 pages black-and-white photographs, appendix
Down Home Press
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Lessons From the Big
House is an affectionate yet thoroughly honest account of a family
whose history is woven into the fabric of the South. Frye Gaillard is a
superb storyteller. No other writer I know understands better the
special joy and burden of being Southern, nor tells of it with such
grace and eloquence. --Robert Inman, author of Home Fires Burning
and Coming Home: Life, Love, and All Things
Southern
Unflinchingly
honest. This book is full of good writing, good history, and above all,
it's a good story. --David Goldfield, author of Black, White, and
Southern
When Frye Gaillard was nine
years old, his grandfather, Palmer Gaillard, summoned him to the front
porch of the Big House, the family home near Mobile. The grandfather
handed the boy a small book he had written and began to tell him stories
of family lore, stories that demonstrated how this prominent and
prestigious family's identity had been forged by challenge and hardship.
Even at that, it was clear to
the boy that his grandfather had chosen him to pass on the heritage of
his Huguenot family to ensuing generations.
Gaillard now fulfills that
obligation with this powerful memoir that is certain to speak to the
heart of every Southerner.
Beginning in the Low Country
of South Carolina with his great-great-great grandfather, Captain Peter
Gaillard, a soldier who began the Revolutionary War on the side of the
British, but switched with the death of his Tory father to fight in the
ranks of his neighbor, Francis Marion, known as the Swamp Fox, Gaillard
traces his slave-owning family through all the other tumultuous events
of Southern history--the Civil War, Reconstruction, and finally the
Civil Rights revolution, in which Gaillard found himself standing
against his own heritage.
Rarely has a work of
literature so successfully shown the effect of place on character.
about the author
Frye Gaillard, a native of Mobile, Alabama, is a graduate of
Vanderbilt University. He has been editor of Race Relations Reporter
and Southern editor of the Charlotte Observer. His work has
appeared in many national publications, and he is the author of nearly a
dozen other books, including Southern Voices, The Dream Long
Deferred, As
Long As the Waters Flow, If
I Were A Carpenter, and The
Heart of Dixie. He has taught at Queens College and lives near
Charlotte, North Carolina, with his wife, Nancy, who worked with him in
researching this book.
Click on one of the other
titles listed below for more information on Frye Gaillard's other books
published and distributed by Blair.
As
Long As the Waters Flow
The Heart of Dixie:
Southern Rebels, Renegades, and Heroes
If I Were A Carpenter
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