This document was discovered in the early 1990s. It was among the effects of an elderly colored lady who had been in an assisted-living center just outside Atlanta.
The resident's name was Prissy Cynara Brown.
Specifically, two documents were found: a leather-bound diary, written in an ornate and hard-to-decipher hand with a pen and pencil, and a typescript of the diary prepared sometime later.
According to notations in her medical records, Ms. Brown was hospitalized in July of 1936 for a period of three months after suffering a severe emotional collapse. She was hospitalized again for a month in 1940, beginning on New Year's Day. Other than these two episodes (which coincide with the publication and movie première of Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind), it appears from letters and clippings that Ms. Brown had enjoyed a life of excellent health and service to the community, frustrated only by her inability to get the diary published.
Pressed into the diary was a photo-postcard of the Washington Monument under construction, a fragment of green silk, and a poem by Ernest Dowson, "Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae."