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In 1962 the world was awash in social and political change on many fronts. Independence from colonial powers was spreading through Africa and elsewhere. In the American South, the Civil Rights Movement continued the struggle to overturn segregation in schools and other public institutions. Under court order, on October 1, 1962, James Meredith was the first African-American to be admitted to the University of Mississippi. This same year John Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth, James Watson and Francis Crick received the Nobel Prize for Science for determining the structure of DNA, and Cole Bishop became infamous in his native state of Georgia when a photograph of himself cradling a dying black female civil rights protester appeared in an Atlanta newspaper.
Who? Cole Bishop? If you’ve never heard of Cole Bishop, it’s because you haven’t read Terry Kay’s The Book of Marie (Macon, GA: Mercer University, 2007). And if you haven’t read anything by Georgia novelist Terry Kay, you have been seriously deprived. To delve into any of his books is to have your heart and soul burst open with laughter, tears, suspense, awe and wisdom.
Kay’s best-known book, To Dance with the White Dog, was made into an award-winning film. Of this book, Anne Rivers Siddons said, “(This) is what literature is – or should be – all about, and what the South at its best still is. Terry Kay is simply a miraculous writer, gifted with poetry, integrity and rare vision.”
The Book of Marie is a love story intertwined with the social change of the last half of the twentieth century that saw Jim Crow laws in the South finally struck down. Through his relationship with the eccentric, brilliant and caustic Marie, a transplant from the North, Cole’s eyes are opened to the injustice of the so-called “separate but equal” system of the South that he has until now accepted uncritically. Marie is merciless in her attacks on Cole for his naiveté, but also loving and protective. Too dreamy, she calls him. As their high school friendship develops, they collude in a hilarious fraud to convince their classmates of their great romance. At graduation Marie as valedictorian delivers a scathing appraisal of “the good white people of Overton County:”
“I came to this school, she began in a strong, sure voice, “believing it offered an inferior education. I leave it affirmed in that fact.
“You are good people,” she continued, “but good people are often timid people, and timid people are always afraid of change…
“One of the first things I learned about the history of this town was of the tornado that struck in 1932. Many of you remember it. Many of you had family killed in that destruction. I want to tell you that you are in the path of another tornado, a tornado of change that is gathering strength all around you. It is a tornado that will destroy every tradition you own, sweep away every belief that props you up, assault you like invisible armies. You cannot survive it as you are.
“You will be confused and angry. You will fight back with words and threats. You will vow to stand strong and resist. You will ask yourself, ‘Why is all of this necessary, when things are fine the way they are?’
“But things are not fine.”…
“In twenty years, nothing will be the same.
“You will not work at the same jobs in the same way.
“You will be invaded by people from other nations, looking for jobs, for a chance to be free, and they will teach you things you have never imagined.”…
“Your children will sit in classrooms with red children, yellow children, black children, and you will cry in anguish because you won’t understand what is happening.
“And the answer is so simple: you cannot exist without change.”

After her speech, Marie leaves the South to attend Harvard. Cole goes to college in Atlanta where he also writes for a newspaper.
Quite by accident, he happens to be watching a civil rights protest in Atlanta when a sniper shoots and kills the young black woman standing in front of him. He catches her as she falls, and a photograph of the two blood-spattered young people appears in newspapers across the country. Misreading the situation, the photograph shocks and infuriates Southern whites who project their hatred and fear of race mixing onto him.
As a result of the publicity, Cole loses his job. Eventually he moves to Vermont to become a university professor. Though they go their separate ways, Marie and Cole maintain a lifelong correspondence that deepens and transforms both of them.
Fifty years later, Cole returns for his high school reunion to marvel at how Marie’s prophesies have all come true. In just one lifetime, huge revolutionary changes have occurred.
I graduated from Mercer University, the publisher of The Book of Marie, in 1962. At that time Mercer, a Southern Baptist school, was still segregated, and the Baptist Church on campus refused to allow blacks to worship there. I know the South of that time all too well.
In 1972 I moved to the West Coast where I still live, but I go back South periodically. It has changed, though remnants of the Old South remain. I am still amazed when I visit and see a mixed-race couple casually walking down the street holding hands and no one runs around that the sky is falling. Who would have believed that this would have been possible fifty years ago, not to mention that the U.S. would have a black President, with an African name no less?
The world needs both dreamers and realists, does it not? It is easy to despair when we consider all the problems facing the planet in this first quarter of a new century: climate change; poverty; racism; growing disparity between the rich and poor; more wars; less peace. But every generation seems to rise to the occasion with its own dreamers and realists to meet the challenges of their time. I trust this generation to do the same if the rest of us will just get out of their way.
This vision and hope is only one of the priceless gifts Terry Kay gives the reader in his beautiful books. Keep writing, Terry Kay, about how it was, how it is, and how it can be! ( )