Augusta Scattergood is the author of Glory Be, the new middle grade book about a young girl named Glory and her experiences in the summer of 1964  in Hanging Moss, Mississippi. While Hanging Moss is not a real town, the towns in the delta that it is based on are very much real. Augusta, or Gusty as her friend call her, should know: She was there. She remembers the era depicted in The Help, remembers the almost electricity of the time when issues always boiled down to color. I was recently on a conference call with Augusta and many other booksellers, and I got to listen to Augusta and her editor Andrea Pinkney, discuss the book and Augusta’s experiences.

Augusta started writing this book ten years ago when she was a school librarian, and this book was really a labor of love for her. During Freedom Summer, Augusta was living in Cleveland, MS, near Delta State. Her friend’s mom was the town librarian in Sunflower, and that summer was a real turning point for her. She says that much of her fodder for this book comes from her time in the delta that summer.

Many things in the book come from history, but Augusta told us in the conference call that some of the things in the book are very similar to real events from her life. Augusta said she had always heard that Robert Kennedy came to Mississippi. He talked to some of the black churches, and people in the area hardly ever heard about it. This visit always intrigued her and so Augusta wrote Robert Kennedy into the story. He visits Glory’s housekeeper’s church, and it really leaves an impression on Glory.

Another scene in the book takes Glory and her sister to Elvis’s birthplace. Augusta herself was an Elvis freak as a child. She was even an Elvis impersonator, and won a contest in Memphis. On Augusta’s trip to Tupelo to see his birthplace with her mother and sister, they all took an edge of green newspaper. Augusta mentioned in the conference call that her is the only one that survived in a scrapbook!

One of my favorite things that Augusta mentioned about the book during this conference call was a quote from the book: “Books have no color and they don’t care who reads them.” This is one of the things the town librarian says, but I also think that it tells simply what Glory Be is about.

Augusta will at Lemuria TODAY at 4:00 to sign her book, Glory Be. Come on over and hear more about Augusta and her book!

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