Leo Daughtry Remembers Midcentury South in 'Talmadge Farm'

Former lawyer and politician, Leo Daughtry, stopped by to share his debut novel, Talmadge Farm. Set in North Carolina in the 1950’s, Talmadge Farm follows the lives of Gordon Talmadge, a wealthy landowner, and the two sharecropping families who reside and tend to the tobacco farm on his property. As readers delve into the novel, they learn how these three families are affected during a period in time when the culture and economy were shifting in the Deep South. As far as the inspiration for this book, Daughtry said, “Well, I wanted to let people know about how farming was in the 50’s, early 60’s. Most people were born after the war was over and I was born before the war started. I lived at a time when all the farms in my area were farmed by what we call sharecroppers… I wanted to tell their story about how their life was very poor… and how it ended, how sharecropping finally ended in this area and were replaced by what we call migrant workers, workers who came down from Florida, up the coast, stopping in South Carolina and migrating up to North Carolina, then on to Virginia, and up that way.”

In the story, the Talmadge’s are the traditional, established family in the community. While many of the characters around them were able to progress during this transitional time, the Talmadge’s were slow to accept these changes. Daughtry explained, “The Talmadge’s were big landowners. They had been there all their life. Their ancestors had compiled about 1,800 acres… They loved the way their life was, they didn’t want it to change so they had sharecroppers and they also had a bank. The bank was not changing also… the time came when they should’ve started doing other things like credit cards, loaning money on banks, loaning money on cars… you can see the Talmadge family begin to not accept the changes that were taking place and they were suffering because of it.”

Talmadge Farm has often been described as a love letter to the South. According to Daughtry, “In spite of what the South has done and is doing, everybody loves the South. The South has a charm about it and this book talks about the good parts of the South and how good the people are and what the South has meant to so many of us… It’s a love story in many respects.”