The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia: A Novel
(Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read)
A hidden history of the South emerges when a worldly teacher leads Threestep, GA, to reinvent itself, setting in motion events that lead to triumph and tragedy for the black teenager who happens to be the smartest person in Piedmont County, Georgia, in 1938–39.
As an epigraph from The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois reminds us at the start of this novel, "Throughout history, the powers of single black men flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness."
Protagonist Theo Boykin is a genius, an artist, an inventor, a Leonardo DaVinci–type, whose talents are sought after by local blacks and whites alike, but even this is not enough to save him. He falls victim to "the tragedy of ignorance and the damage caused by fear," in the words of poet Rita Dove—the first African American to serve as U.S. Poet Laureate and a member of the jury that conferred on The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia the 2011 Anisfield-Wolf Award for books that "make a significant contribution to our understanding of racism and our appreciation for the diversity of human cultures."
You won't forget Theo Boykin, nor will you forget his friends the Cailiffs, especially Gladys, who tells this story with love and bewilderment, and the teacher, Miss Spivey, who changes all their lives.
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Mary Helen Stefaniak. (2011). The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia: A Novel. W. W. Norton & Company.
Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)Mary Helen Stefaniak. 2011. The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia: A Novel. W. W. Norton & Company.
Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)Mary Helen Stefaniak, The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia: A Novel. W. W. Norton & Company, 2011.
MLA Citation (style guide)Mary Helen Stefaniak. The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia: A Novel. W. W. Norton & Company, 2011.
| Library | Owned | Available |
|---|---|---|
| Shared Digital Collection | 1 | 1 |
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A hidden history of the South emerges when a worldly teacher leads Threestep, GA, to reinvent itself, setting in motion events that lead to triumph and tragedy for the black teenager who happens to be the smartest person in Piedmont County, Georgia, in 1938–39.
As an epigraph from The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois reminds us at the start of this novel, "Throughout history, the powers of single black men flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness."
Protagonist Theo Boykin is a genius, an artist, an inventor, a Leonardo DaVinci–type, whose talents are sought after by local blacks and whites alike, but even this is not enough to save him. He falls victim to "the tragedy of ignorance and the damage caused by fear," in the words of poet Rita Dove—the first African American to serve as U.S. Poet Laureate and a member of the jury that conferred on The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia the 2011 Anisfield-Wolf Award for books that "make a significant contribution to our understanding of racism and our appreciation for the diversity of human cultures."
You won't forget Theo Boykin, nor will you forget his friends the Cailiffs, especially Gladys, who tells this story with love and bewilderment, and the teacher, Miss Spivey, who changes all their lives.
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- source: David Long, author of The Inhabited World
- content: Wonderfully seductive, one of those rare books you disappear into wholly. It's joyous, shamelessly funny, heartbreaking, and page after page it gives you what you didn't expect. This is a novel you'll want to hand deliver to a friend.
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- source: Jill McCorkle, author of Going Away Shoes
- content: Wonderfully engaging ... a great tribute to the power of education, strong women and the fine art of storytelling... an intricate dazzling pattern of history and imagination and truth.
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- source: John Dufresne, author of Louisiana Power & Light and Love Warps the Mind a Little
- content: A heartfelt, redemptive, and irresistible novel. Stefaniak knows that every story is many stories, and she handles the complex tales of romance, family, race relations, and secrets with intelligence, grace, and tenderness.
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- source: Lynne Sharon Schwartz, author of Ruined by Reading: A Life in Books
- content: Mary Helen Stefaniak is a born storyteller, with a fantastic gift for mingling the exotic and the ordinary, the comic and the heartrending. Her tale of drastic change coming to a small Southern town in the 1930s is filled with wild incidents, vivid characters, and a surprise at every turn—a delight to read.
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- source: Clyde Edgerton, author of The Bible Salesman
- content: This novel has strong, long legs. I hope it walks forever. Besides delivering suspenseful, eloquently detailed, non-sentimental prose, it spoons out a big dose of clarity that America needs.
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- source: Minneapolis Star Tribune
- content: So lush with detail that most scenes possess cinematic immediacy. Ultimately, reading about the triumphs and tragedies of the Cailiffs will make readers feel right at home amid Georgia pines and pecans.
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July 19, 2010
Stefaniak (The Turk and My Mother) delivers a deeply engaging story from the heart of 1930s-era Threestep, Ga., that manages to include stop offs in 1775 Baghdad and 1864 Savannah along the way. Loosely following the tradition of The Thousand and One Nights, which spunky Miss Spivey uses as the core curriculum in her one-room Threestep schoolhouse, the novel is full of intrigue, with babies switched at birth, the Ku Klux Klan, camels fluent in Arabic, and wish-granting genies. Told primarily from the point-of-view of 11-year-old Gladys, the tale begins with the arrival of Miss Spivey, the new teacher in town. Fascinated by the Middle East, she transforms the town into Baghdad, culminating in a bazaar that attracts Georgians from across the state. But the young teacher's progressive spirit proves threatening to some, and her vision falls prey to a tragic chain of events, giving the novel a much-needed boost. In the tradition of Scheherazade, stories are told within stories, by many tellers, creating a nesting doll of events for the young Gladys to get to the bottom of.
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A hidden history of the South emerges when a worldly teacher leads Threestep, GA, to reinvent itself, setting in motion events that lead to triumph and tragedy for the black teenager who happens to be the smartest person in Piedmont County, Georgia, in 1938–39.
As an epigraph from The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois reminds us at the start of this novel, "Throughout history, the powers of single black men flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness."
Protagonist Theo Boykin is a genius, an artist, an inventor, a Leonardo DaVinci–type, whose talents are sought after by local blacks and whites alike, but even this is not enough to save him. He falls victim to "the tragedy of ignorance and the damage caused by fear," in the words of poet Rita Dove—the first African American to serve as U.S. Poet Laureate and a member of the jury that conferred on The...
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