TO MY LITERARY AGENT, JOY HARRIS, AND TO MY EDITOR, Marjorie Braman, I owe a joyful debt of gratitude for their belief in me and this book and their indefatigable work on our behalf. They have become dear friends.
My thanks must also begin with my gratitude to my husband, John C. Morrison, for his constant support in the writing of this book and for his considered comments that helped to shape it. I also offer a special thanks, within my family, to my brother John Sims Jeter, who encouraged me and corrected many of my mistakes, while working on his own first novel, and to his wife Derelene Brooks Jeter, for her heartfelt praise and astute suggestions. My daughter Flora Naslund and her partner, Marty Kelley, always cheer me on in my efforts to write, as do Sara and Michael McQuilling; Debora, Paul, David, and Ryan Morrison, my stepchildren; and David Rizzolo, Debora’s husband. I also thank my brother and sister-in-law, Marvin Jeter and Charlotte Copeland, for their support.
For reading every draft of the novel and freely giving of their time and insights, while completing their own novels, I thank especially Lucinda Dixon Sullivan and Karen Mann. Other writer friends whose critiques I have cherished include Julie Brickman, Marcia Woodruff Dalton, Greg Ellis, Robin Lippincott, Eleanor Morse, Jeanie Thompson, Neela Vaswani, Mary Welp, and the actor/director Sheila O’Neill Ellis. I can never thank each of you enough for your generous advice.
A very special thanks to Nancy Brooks Moore, my lifelong friend, and Ron Countryman for their careful reading and much-needed encouragement. I also thank Richard M. Sullivan and Elizabeth Chadwick for their advice about the opening sequence. I thank Callie Hausman and Thelma Wyland for directing me to essential reading in my research and for their faith in me.
Many other friends—including Lynn Greenberg, Maura Stanton, Richard Cecil, Alan Naslund, Paul Bresnick, Leslie Daniels, Deborah and David Stewart, Ralph Raby, Maureen Morehead, Nana Lampton, Charles and Patricia Gaines, Jake Reiss, Frank and Diana Richmond, Elizabeth Sulzby, Luke Wallin, Daly Walker, Bill Pearce, Denzil Strickland, Katy Yocom, Jim Rooney, and Susan Soper—have encouraged me in ways for which I am profoundly grateful.
I thank all my colleagues and friends at the University of Louisville, especially Tom Byers, Suzette Henke, and Karen Chandler, and all my colleagues and students of the Spalding University M.F.A. in Writing Program. I thank the University of Louisville for granting me a sabbatical leave, during which I worked on research and the writing of this novel, English Department Chairperson Debra Journet, and Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences Jim Brennan. Over the years, grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women have been particularly sustaining, as well as from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Kentucky Arts Council. The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, Kelly Ingram Park and the Birmingham Public Library, the Rosa Parks Museum and the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, and the Martin Luther King Jr. Museum in Atlanta have provided places of inspiration and reflection for me, as has the King memorial of rushing waters in San Francisco.
A special thanks to the University of Montevallo, Alabama, where my husband and I shared the Pascal P. Vacca Chair of Liberal Arts during the spring of 2003, and to Elaine and Bobby Hughes, and Bill and Loretta Cobb, among many other new Montevallo friends.
And to my newest friend, Chris McNair—how can I ever thank you enough for letting me into your life and for taking the author photograph for Four Spirits?