The Last Witness From a Dirt Road

by Bill Hunt

Two coming-of-age boys, best friends, one white and the other black, live extraordinary childhoods on a Louisiana sugarcane plantation in 1946.... From his thirteen-year-old heart and conscience, Billy tells a subtly funny, emotive and poignant story. The kid witnesses the social and economic forms of segregation and oppression in the early years following WWII, and finds himself accepted by both sides of clearly delineated social and racial divide. When a rare snow storm blankets the area on Thanksgiving Day, he is stunned as he recognizes the great disparity in his life in the "Big House" to the deprivation in the lives of his friends in the Plantation Quarters. From that time of stark awareness of the inequities around him, the dirt road and the plantation symbolize the meanness of way of life essentially unchanged for over two hundred years. His boyhood friendship with the Black friend, Papa, becomes a heart wrenching victim of the times in which they lived. "At the heart of this story, lies the sense that a world Billy once considered safe is in fact, dark and dangeerous, powered by the persistent evils of segregation, inequality and suppression." With a masterful stroke of dialect as existed along the back roads in the plantation country of Louisiana in 1946, Bill Hunt makes you believe you lived there. As Billy and Papa did sixty years ago, you, too, will be caught in the nets, boundaries and lines that suffocated and divided them, and you'll recognize, though shaded and dimmed, those same lines are still in place today. Its messsage is for the whole world, right now, about family, relationships, love, joy, and tragedies, with fascinating characters; your heart will vacillate, you'll cry and laugh. (A SEBA Award nominated book--2006. Author lectured at two Universities, assigned reading at three. A fictionalized memoir.)

200 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 14, 2013

Reviews

[Patricia A. Phillips · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kinfolk

I enjoyed reading the book. It brought back many memories from my own childhood because the author's father was my great uncle. I grew up in Gold Dust and attended school in Bunkie. Many of the people mentioned in the book are family members who are gone but not forgotten.