Promise Land: A Farmer Remembers Book

In her first new work published in nearly a decade, farmer-turned-novelist Dori Sanders looks back at the struggles and triumphs of her own family's story.

The farm where she grew up in Filbert, South Carolina, profoundly shaped the writer Sanders was to become. "Because the former slaves could buy the land with only a small down payment and the promise to pay the rest of the money owed, the rural farming community came to be called 'Promise Land,'" she explains.

But this is more than nostalgia for a simpler time. Sanders candidly details the hardships and dispels the myths of life in the Jim Crow South. She takes readers back to her childhood, when she first felt the sting of segregation.

She recounts the exploitation of black sharecroppers. "For generations to come and down to this day, the slaves' descendants would chant the true meaning of sharecropping for them: "The 'S' stands for slavery, the 'C' for continued," Sanders writes.

She powerfully evokes the ever-present threat of a KKK ride. Then, turning to today, she explains the difficulties black farmers still face in the 21st-century South. But with authority and clarity of voice, she never lets readers forget that hers was a community of grace, and of goodness.

This monograph is adapted from an address delivered in October 2004, by Dori Sanders at the Southern Foodways Alliance Annual Symposium at the University of Mississippi, which co-sponsored publication of this work.

Author Bio: Dori Sanders is author of the beloved novel, Clover, which won the Lillian Smith Award. She grew up in Filbert, South Carolina, where today, she and her family still bring forth crops from the farmland they have worked for decades.