Zula Bragg is an entirely fictional character, and so is everybody else in this novel. Thus: any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental, and the figment of somebody else’s imagination.
There is no Ogilvie College nor is there a town called Ogilvie in Georgia. I have put my imaginary Ogilvie southeast of Savannah on a railway line that is mostly fictional. The Seaboard Coast Line once existed, but in 1986 it was subsumed into the less poetically named CSX Transportation, and diverted.
All reference works quoted here also are fictional, and of my creation alone, but Farscape, Rivera’s and Angie’s favorite sci-fi television program, is indeed real.
Lots of people lent a hand with this, many of them born-and-bred southerners; others who came to the South by choice or chance. These include Bruce Beasley, Penny Chambers, Thor Hansen, and Suzanne Paola. I’m especially thankful for the thoughtful reading of early and not-so-early drafts by Pokey Bolton, Cheryll Greenwood Kinsley, and Ruth Czirr. Ruth was tremendously helpful in sorting through some of the complexities of southern small-town customs and social structures. Joy Johannessen provided much-needed and very welcome editorial commentary and a new perspective, which were immensely helpful. Joe Vassallo answered a lot of questions about documentary film production with great clarity and patience. As always, mistakes are not to be laid at anybody’s doorstep but my own.
Thanks especially to Jill Grinberg, for thoughtful feedback and encouragement when it was most needed, to Leona Nevler, who fell for Ogilvie just as hard as I did, and to Bill and Elisabeth, whose faith in me seems to have no bounds.