E. B. Shelton blends a love of writing and research with her ancestors’ anecdotes creating memorable stories to educate and entertain.
HEAR THE DIRT SING
Based on True Events
A fiery cross and a cadre of hooded thugs can’t scare the Robinson sisters away from their land. The five scrappy, white-haired women, born and raised in the heart of Louisiana cotton country, are not about to quit the farm their ancestors had risked everything to build, rebuild, and preserve.
When Etta May Robinson stumbles over the body of a dead man in one of their fields, a man she knows and fears, the investigation leads to an unexpected reckoning. Etta May has secrets – truths not spoken of in the genteel Southern society of the early 1900s.
Accustomed to hard work in a man’s world, the sisters grapple with a society that holds the opinion a woman’s place is inside the home, not behind a plow. Whether handling a hoe or a shotgun, they’re prepared to defend their way of life from scoundrels, plagues, and Old Man River.
When the sisters’ niece, Penny Robinson, a New Orleans journalist, returns to the farm to interview them for a human-interest article, she learns more about the women who raised her after her father’s tragic accident.
Farm life is harsh, and there are many reasons to sell the land and move away. But the more questions Penny asks, digging into the family history, the more reasons she finds to stay and listen to the dirt sing.
Read Sample of Hear the Dirt Sing
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Sugarland: Family Stories of the Nadlers and Robertsons in South Louisiana 1888-1911
Sweet, sweet Iberville, Henry mused while scanning the landscape through the open windows of the jostling steam train. From snowy white cotton fields, the flat terrain transitioned to endless fields of giant green sugarcane stalks, dwarfing the fieldworkers like an enchanted forest in a fairytale.
The incessant clack-clack-clack of the train chugging through the Louisiana flatlands slowed its tempo as it approached the small settlements of Iberville Parish.
Sugarcane crops stretched out to the horizon in the west. To the east, the great Mississippi River flowed relentlessly, winding its way further south until the muddy waters comingled with the salty brine of the Gulf of Mexico.
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A Forgotten Poet:
Alice Lorraine Young
At one time, Alice’s poetry
was featured in a small-town
newspaper.