A DREAM OF MANSIONS

A Southern small town portrait is by no means a Mockingbird's eye-view except for two external points of resemblance: it focusses on- and filters through- young, 12(apple) year old Hallie Jones, and whatever narrative momentum is gained- only toward the close- is sparked through its concerns with racial prejudice. The time is 1920, when Hallie and her family move from South Carolina to Greenwood, Georgia, and along with the many speculations Hallie entertains about the people she meets there, she dreams of mansions with columns, dovecotes and white horses, substituting a more glorious past for the shabby realities of the present. Her mansions, Montpelier and Magnolia Hall, do not materialize, but Miss Beulah's 7th sight, which predicts a white baby for the Jones' Negro girl, Elberta, is accurate. And the birth of the white infant brings to light another ugly fact- the KKK, the guilt of handsome Jess Bailey whom Hallie had romanticized, the involvement of her own brother, and a further threat of tragedy..... The many scenes and characters here- while they do not tell a story- do fuse in the middle ground between a young girl's fancies and the facts of life in an unreconstructed southern town such as this.