The Road to Margaret: A Story of Hope and Survival in the Industrial South

Gertrude is a Black Indian who grows up in an obscure mining town called Margaret. She leaves the troubles there to come to work for the author's white Southern family in Birmingham, Alabama. Not until she and the author, white and black together, learn to confront a long history of bombings, murders, union troubles, racial and religious discrimination do they learn to live--each in her own way.

Lyn Stafford if from Birmingham, Alabama. She served as editor for several publications, including the Alabama Journal of Medical Sciences, the Annals of Saudi Medicine, and the Southern Medical Journal. Today, she is a poet and free-lance writer and editor. Her fascination with local social history grew out of working with many of Birmingham’s writers, including the authors of the Italian Americans in the Deep South, the History of Medicine in Alabama, and the Button Gwinnett Papers, whose works she helped bring to press. She loves research, especially the grueling research needed to write creative nonfiction. In between being a mother, grandmother and real estate agent, she spends as many hours as possible among archival material containing the stories that interest her. Many of these she believes are begging to be told, especially those forgotten tales of justices and injustices that altered history, even in small ways. Her stories abound with characters who were often the main actors in a town’s past, whose stories may yet shed light on the present and, she hopes, inspire new solutions to old problems. She calls herself just another amateur historian who feels compelled to tell a few of the stories she has held dear for many years. Lyn currently lives on Eastern Lake in the Panhandle of Florida, where she has lived and been involved in the community for more than twenty years. She plans to return to Birmingham to write a few more such stories and to live near the people and places she loves.