Southern Families: Their Friends, Servants, Rivals, and Affairs 1901-1911

This novel is set in Perquimmons City, North Carolina, an imaginary town of roughly 5,500 people (slightly over 40 percent black). Although it doesn’t ignore the serious racial problems of the early twentieth century, their depiction isn’t the novel’s main purpose. Its main purpose is to describe the underlying tension between an extremely snobbish and aristocratic family—the Merritts—who live in one of the state’s few surviving antebellum mansions and whose forebears had dominated the area...