A Tennessee Story Part 1

Love and Hate in the Southern Appalachians

By: Bill Ed Scruggs

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

In the 1950s in segregated Tennessee, six free souls find themselves transgressing the rigid social boundaries left over from the old South. The son of a bigoted farmer is fascinated by a letter stolen from a 15-year-old sharecropper girl asking help from Martin Luther King. The aged white owner of a mountain cabin finds himself playing grandfather to the same black sharecropper girl. For a while he has a wonderful grandchild and the difference in skin color is invisible to them. And a rich valley boy whose life has been carefully planned by his father is spellbound by a dirt-poor mountain girl who talks like it is 1800 and who can never ever fit into his father’s plan—and it turns out he doesn’t fit into her father’s plan either. But the fathers face boundless love and courage (and the boy’s ability to take a beating and keep on coming). Relationships intertwine as characters struggle with desire vs. fear. Secret meetings and lies abound—not for the first time in the American South—for the enforcement of custom is harsh. Violence and disaster await only a simple misstep, a chance encounter, a wrong guess, as the old South flashes its unspent fury and love demonstrates its eternal claim on human hearts.