Georgia Days in the 1950s

Murphy Station is a multilayered story of the coming of age of David Donovan in the rural landscape of south Georgia in the fifties. (Donovan is the pseudonym of Terry Turner, professor emeritus at the University of Virginia.) There is also a larger story—that of the transformation of that rural landscape. Donovan skillfully intersperses recollections of boyhood exploits with a perceptive analysis of the small farming community of Murphy Station and the changes that took place there. What distinguishes Donovan's memoir from the usual coming-of-age stories set in the South are his thoughtful reflections on the impact of the civil-rights movement and the Cold War on his childhood.

The Murphy Station of Donovan's childhood was a farming community located between Moultrie and Thomasville, Georgia—a crossroads with a general store, a grist mill, one church, and a cemetery. In the social structure of that era, land determined status and no upper class existed. The established farmers constituted the middle class; but there were also the white farmworkers, the nonworking or "rarely working poor," and the black fieldhands or sharecroppers. The key institutions in such communities were the general stores, the churches, and the schools. Daily life was governed by rituals associated with work, church, basketball, baseball, and the Sunday afternoon gathering of the clan at Grandmother Murphy's in nearby Coolidge.

Family is central to the Donovan story; and, in a place where people lived and died near where they grew up, Donovan suggests that family relationships had a tribal quality, with myths over time becoming legends handed down by oral tradition. More important than the large extended family to Donovan's development were the loving but stern and frugal parents who had high expectations for their two sons and who took seriously their responsibilities for instilling proper values.

David Donovan grew to manhood in Murphy Station. Work on the farm was expected, but there was time for recreation, much of it unstructured and unsupervised. Parents led busy lives. Rules of behavior, however, were clear, and the expectation was that boys would adhere to those rules. "No boy a chicken, no man a coward" served as the guiding principle for play. Risk-taking sometimes landed the boys in trouble, but danger was mostly averted. When a bad boy was caught, punishment was certain; and, to avoid that possibility, the boys learned to shade the truth. While the responsibilities of farm work instilled a strong work ethic, unstructured time, space to roam, and the lack of store-bought toys encouraged imagination, inventiveness, and independence.

No discussion of the coming of age of southern boys would be complete without considering the role of guns. Hunting, clearly an inheritance from an agrarian past, is part of the culture of the rural South and provides a bond between father and son; fathers take seriously the responsibility of instructing their sons on the protocols involving hunting. War games were also a significant focus of play for southern boys from an early age. Donovan suggests that "at some point, southern males absorb the message that making war was about the only thing in our tradition more constant than cotton or credit." Donovan suggests that the war stories told by older male relatives played a role in the emphasis on war games; and, from books, boys absorbed a rudimentary knowledge of military strategy. When boys started to discover that girls were part of the universe, new strategies had to be developed and executed, and the war games palled. David Donovan can be forgiven for indulging in nostalgia as he describes growing up in Murphy Station. Despite looming shadows it was an innocent time.

Murphy Station began to decline in the fifties. The arrival of the telephone and television enlarged the worldview of the residents. The conversion of trains from steam to diesel and the mechanization of agriculture had an economic impact. Employment dropped, resulting in the depopulation of the community. With the consolidation of the...