Beyond Plantation Alley

Beyond the Alley is a book about the lives of sixty or more sharecropping families that lived on plantation land in an Alley in a southern town call Natchez, Mississippi from the late 1800's. This compelling story is about family love, forgiveness, friendships, family gatherings, spirituality, harvesting, fornication, adultery, murders, rapes and endurance in the south when racism, terror, and fear often appeared. In 1971 several of the families began to migrate to the north and west to seek better living conditions and education. Twenty years later the first Alley reunion was held in 1993 and death had visited most of the elders in all of the families. Some familiar faces were no longer visible in the crowd as I watched families running to one another hugging, talking, crying and kissing. I realized at that moment no matter what we all went through, heard, seen and done it was and still is love and fellowship that sustains the Alley even today.