Passing Down Memories

The story of author Dori Sanders

DORI SANDERS had been a reader, “a deep reader,” she says, all her life, but she’d never been a serious writer. In the late 1980s, however, she knew it was time to write her own books. She wanted to leave something for her nieces and nephews, she says, “because I know when my generation passes, this farm will pass out of our family.”

Her father purchased a farm—at least part of one—in rural Filbert, South Carolina, about 1915, before he married. He had passed by the land of sandy soil many times in his horse and buggy, on his way to the two-room elementary school where he was principal, and thought it would be ideal for farming. Dori and her nine siblings grew up on this land, one of the oldest African American farms in the region. And her father was right: It was great for farming, for growing peaches and okra and corn and tomatoes to feed a family and to provide produce to sell to customers from a stand alongside Highway 321.

Dori Sanders sits in a straight-back chair in her sister’s house, about four miles from the Filbert farm, and talks about her family, her childhood, and how she envisioned the story line of her first book. The first idea drove by right in front of her one day while she was sitting at that farm stand, waiting for customers. A funeral procession eased by, and a little black girl waved to her. “She waved a little sweeping wave from an open window, and I thought about that little hand. It was as though the little girl was trying to catch sadness itself out of the very air because she brought her hand in like this,” Sanders says, cupping her hand and drawing it in toward her heart. “See, I was a reader, a reader, a reader. My daddy said that if you read, it teases your intellectual curiosity.”

Later that same day, down the highway comes another funeral procession, and Sanders watches a white woman dab daintily at her tears with a white laced handkerchief. She was riding in a Bentley. The little girl was in an old car. “And I wondered what would happen if that little girl wound up with that woman,” Sanders says. So, in her imagination, she pulled the black girl out of the car and made her ten years old. She pulled the white woman out of her Bentley, “and didn’t give her no age, because in South Carolina on the farm, women don’t tell age. They say you tell your age, you tell everything.”

That first novel, Clover, is the story of a ten-year-old black girl in South Carolina named Clover whose father, the principal of the local elementary school, marries a white woman, Sara Kate. Just hours later, the father is killed in an automobile accident, leaving Clover with a stepmother she hardly knows in a community that’s foreign to her.

For her book’s characters, Sanders watched real people, including those who rode by the farm stand. Some of them were the customers. She wrote down what they said and how they said it, sometimes while they stood at the stand, because she was afraid she’d forget their words. One woman, bless her heart, lectured Sanders for killing a black widow spider. “Didn’t you read Charlotte’s Web?” she scolded. The woman became a character in the book. Sanders also threw in some relatives, friends, and a few drunks and crazy people.

The novel, published in 1990, was a huge success. Clover won the Lillian Smith Award for Southern literature that enhances racial awareness and was recommended reading for classrooms across the country. The New York Times Book Review called the story “very much the genuine item”—no surprise to Sanders, since she used real people for her characters. The Washington Post Book World said the book “sews these family scenes together like a fine quilt maker.” In 1997, Clover became a made-for-TV movie, “and that,” Sanders says, “was a great honor.”

Sanders has been a popular speaker and panelist at writers’ conferences and other gatherings ever since Clover hit the bookstores. She even spoke at universities in Denmark, and she was one of four judges one year for the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award.

She is independent and self-confident, just as her father wanted her to be, but she is also engaging and charming. It’s her vitality, her enthusiasm, her wit that attract people to her. And you never know what she will say.

Sanders loves farming, food, and life itself. And, unlike most contemporary writers, she writes of farm life from experience. She knows how to milk cows, how to grow peaches, how to harvest row crops. She knows about hog killings. She knows rural life itself because she has lived it.

Sanders, it is obvious, revered her father. He was stern, strict, disciplined. “It was work, work, work,” she says. “Sunrise, sunset, work, work, work. I would say my father was a man for all seasons because he always had something to do.” But he was a good man, she adds quickly, someone who believed every child, black or white, should have books to read and an opportunity to be successful in life.

Her father also believed in giving back to the community. He sent his children when a neighbor needed help and wouldn’t allow them to accept money for their work. “If the farmer over there happens to be white, or black, you go help them,” Sanders says. “Didn’t matter. You didn’t have to go get anyone. That’s the way it was.”

Dori Sanders wasn’t much for sitting in a classroom learning arithmetic; her vivid imagination was always taking her to foreign places, places she had read about in books. “I was a deep reader,” she says again. She read the classics. Hawthorne. Shakespeare. Homer. She talks about books with passion and expression, her voice rising and falling, almost singing at times. Occasionally she takes a breath. Words fascinate her, and her words fascinate whoever is listening.

“Imagine growing up in the country,” she says, her eyes widened. “No electricity, but all those books, the classics, all those great writers. Someone asked me, ‘So you grew up with the classics?’ Of course, I did. What kind of books did you grow up with?’ All these wonderful books, and my father had all those books.”

As a young woman, reading, working, and cooking mostly consumed Sanders’s life. There wasn’t much else to do. “The little town of Filbert,” Sanders writes in a note at the end of Clover, “consisted of a general store, a peach packing shed, a cotton gin, two churches, two schools, and a train depot. I can close my eyes and picture that store, with the well-worn wooden floorboards that creaked, particularly the candy section where generations of children had shifted from one foot to the other while trying to decide between B-B Bats, Johnny cakes, and candy sticks of all colors. The smells of cinnamon buns, coffee, and onions mingled with those of cotton seed, Octagon Soap, and fertilizers. Wintertime was best of all, when the aroma of kerosene and burning oak from the big black stove made a pungent potpourri.”

After Clover, Sanders wrote another novel, Her Own Place, published in 1994. It traces the life of Mae Lee Barnes, an African American from rural South Carolina who buys a farm, works it, raises a family, and moves to town. Protagonist Mae Lee, Sanders says, “represents all women who struggled after World War II.”

These days, Sanders is a caregiver. She looks after members of the family who call and say, “Oh, Dori, please, can you come and stay an hour over here?” or “Can you take this person to the doctor?” She’s helping out relatives and old people she knows in the neighborhood. But she’s still called on to speak, and on the day of this interview, she was trying to find time to read and critique Their Eyes Were Watching God, a 1937 novel by African American writer Zora Neal Hurston. Sanders is on the program at The Big Read in Low Country South Carolina in a couple of weeks, where she “will explore how Hurston infused the characters and their world in the novel with reality and how her descriptions, meanings, and observations mirror truth.”

Sanders probably wouldn’t have said it that way—it’s a bit fancy—but she knows about infusing characters with reality. Decades before Clover, she and her siblings gathered at a place they called “the storytelling rock,” where they shared stories of all sorts. And when she became a serious writer, she knew, from experience, that storytelling is all about being real, even in fiction.

And that is Dori Sanders: a storyteller, yes, but first a simple farmer from Filbert, South Carolina, someone who still tills the land with her brother Orestus; who still sits at the farm stand during season selling peaches and okra and other produce; who still puts her family’s needs before her need to write. She’s well-known now. Outside of her family and friends, only her regular customers knew her on the day those two funeral processions passed by her farm stand, triggering a brilliant idea for a novel.

Sometimes, she says, she has “felt like a buzz above the farming,” now that she’s an author and popular speaker. But then she hears a sharp command from brother Orestus: “Dori, get your tractor over here.” And, suddenly, she’s a farmer again.