1. Pat Cunningham Devoto

2. Pat Cunningham DeVoto Pat Cunningham DeVoto was born and raised in Alabama. She is a former high school history teacher and currently resides in Atlanta, Georgia. Bibliography: My Last Days As Roy Rogers Out Of The Night That Covers Me My Last Days As Roy Rogers Out Of The Night That Covers Me

3. Pat Cunningham Devoto Devoto was born and raised in Alabama where her family first settled in the 1820s. She attended the University of Tennessee, as did her parents and grandparents. Then, like everyone else in the South, it seemed, she moved to Atlanta just out of college. Today she lives in Alabama, Atlanta and Montana.

4. Pat Cunningham Devoto Born and raised in Alabama, novelist Pat Cunningham Devoto harnesses the place she knows and remembers. She writes lyrically of the South's geography and honestly about its dark history. "Themes are universal, but many writers use a locale they are comfortable with to espouse things they believe in. I'm comfortable in the South," she said.

5. The Alabama River That's not just any river on the cover of her novel, Out of the Night That Covers Me. It's the Alabama River, and Devoto, who took the haunting picture herself, makes it serve in her story as the divide between whites and blacks, the entitled and the disenfranchised.

6. Races in the South Out of the Night That Covers Me has a hard-earned knowledge, dealing more directly with the disparity of wealth and position between races in the South.

7. Kay’s Bend/Gee’s Bend The novel is set in Kay's Bend, a marginalized black community based on a real place called Gee's Bend in the rich-soiled area known as the Alabama Black Belt. Devoto depicts it in her book as a forgotten spot with "very few cars or tractors, no paved roads, little indoor plumbing, and no telephones. It didn't matter to... the people of Kay's Bend. Home was a place of common experience, of standing together."

8. QUILTS FROM GEE’S BEND

9. ECONOMIC CONDITIONS The history of the South is one of huge contrasts in economic conditions between blacks and whites," said Devoto from her home in Atlanta. "This book was set in the 1950s, a time where the reader will see the kind of situation that prompted the first strike for civil rights."

10. John Gallatin McMillan III Just as Kay's Bend is based on a real place, John is based on a real person. "I had a friend when I was a child who lived up the street from me, the only son of a mother who had adopted him late in life. I always thought his life was so cloistered, so predicted. I wondered what would happen if his life changed in some drastic way. The character of John grew out of that childhood friend," Devoto said.

11. John McMillan – Protagonist Witnessing and mirroring the plight of the people of Kay's Bend is eight-year-old John McMillan, a character who first appeared in Devoto's debut novel, My Last Days as Roy Rogers.

12. PLOT for OUT OF THE NIGHT THAT COVERS ME John McMillan, a young white boy living with a poor and abusive sharecropper uncle, and Tuway, an unusual black man, become unlikely friends in this novel set in 1950s Alabama. By the author of My Last Days as Roy Rogers.

13. Dogtrot Houses John McMillan comes of age in this poignant tale, set in 1950s Alabama. Orphaned at the age of 8, John is uprooted from his comfortable life, taken away to live in a tumbledown shack with his Aunt Nelda. There the boy experiences not only culture shock but outright brutality at the hands of his Uncle Luther who works him almost to death in the cotton fields and then beats him. He finds redemption and comfort, however, when he gets a job working for a local judge.

14. What will Devoto write next? Devoto isn't done writing about it or about John and her other characters. "When I first started writing, I didn't realize I would follow John and these other characters, but it feels like a natural thing to do," she said. "I see so much more that I want to say."

15. TITLE Invictus by William E. Henley Out of the night that covers me, Black as the Pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul. In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed. Beyond this place of wrath and tears Looms but the Horror of the shade, And yet the menace of the years Finds and shall find me unafraid. It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul. WILlIAM E. HENLEY

16. The Title It was a well-known poem in the fifties, one that school children were required to read and often memorize. Its theme speaks to the struggle of my main character, John. He must take control of his life in order to survive in a world completely alien to anything he has ever known, brought about by circumstances over which he has absolutely no control. In the same way the poem might apply to the African Americans living in the Alabama Black Belt at the time, as they were on the verge of realizing that they must take control of their destiny. In a way, perhaps it speaks to the condition of the entire south in the 1950's as it approaches a crossroads carrying a very heavy history it must take in hand and mold into new beginnings.

17. Will your next novel also be set in the 1950s? I'd like to write one more story, perhaps early- to mid-sixties, that would, in my mind, complete a three-book thought about that period in time.

18. The Black Belt The Black Belt is generally defined as a land area 20 to 25 miles wide running across south-central Alabama. The dark soil for which the Black Belt was named was once famous for its richness and its abundant cotton production. The Historic Black Belt's Conditions remain some of the worst in our nation. The Black Belt is still home to persistent poverty, poor employment, low incomes, low education, poor health, high infant mortality and dependance

19. The Black Belt In the early 1800s over 70 percent of the slave population in the state of Alabama was located in the Black Belt.

20. Stark Contrast There was a huge black population that was completely disenfranchised and a white population so long ensconced changes that were about to come in power that they could not imagine any other way of life--and certainly couldn't fathom the changes that were about to come.

21. Civil Rights Movement This was the area of the country that gave rise to the first strikes of the civil rights movement; the Montgomery bus Boycott, the Selma voting rights drive, and the Selma to Montgomery march.

22. . The story assumes the role of historian with its hints at prejudice and the whirl of changing ideas and emotions during the days before Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would aspire to make those changing notions effective.

23. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In 1965, Martin Luther King Jr. visited Gee’s Bend and after that, things were never the same. In 1968, when Dr. King was assassinated, the mules that pulled the casket through the streets of Atlanta were from Gee’s Bend, Alabama.”

24. How did you research the background for this story? My sister lived for a time in that part of the state and still has in-laws down there. They are known in the family as Aunt Robina and Aunt Tommie. As I began to gather material for this story, I would tag along with my sister when she visited them. They were in their mid-eighties when I first began visiting, they are in their mid-nineties now.

25. How did you research the background for this story? If you take the famous highway 80 from Montgomery to Selma, go over the Edmond Pettus Bridge and keep going west on 80 you come to a small town called Uniontown, Alabama and about two blocks off the main street of Uniontown is the same old two-story Georgian house that Aunt Robina and Aunt Tommie have lived in for over fifty years.

26. How did you research the background for this story? The fascinating thing about visiting the sisters was that they were, and are, walking, talking histories of the area. On a typical visit we would all get up in the morning, be made to eat a huge breakfast, and then get in the car, the sisters sitting in the back giving directions, and we would drive around the area, the sisters pointing out everything we passed--train depots, churches, falling down cotton gins--and telling me a story about each one of them

27. Connection to Fitzgerald "See that house over there, honey? Scott and Zelda used to visit there and everybody would get drunk as Cooter Brown and stay that way all weekend."

28. What about Kay's Bend? Is that a real place? The mythical Kay's Bend is much like the real Gee's Bend, Alabama, an isolated African American community in the south-central end of the state. It was first settled in the early 1800s when its owner walked his slaves from North Carolina across South Carolina and Georgia into the Bend to clear the land and establish a large plantation. Over the years, be cause of its isolation, the slaves who later became tenant farmers in Gee's Bend kept many of their old customs and ways of life. In the mid-1 950s, when this story takes place, there were still no paved roads, no telephones, and very little indoor plumbing. The main contact with the outside world was by a ferry that crossed the Alabama River close to the town of Camden. During the civil rights era, the ferry was stopped, some say in order to keep the people of Gee's Bend from participating in civil right marches in nearby Camden, Selma, and Montgomery. There are plans today to reopen the ferry.

29. Gee’s Bend Gee's Bend is unique in that it was part of the WPA writers' project in the 1930s. For that reason there is a wealth of documented information about the history of Gee's Bend. Although large numbers of blacks have left the area, there are still many descendents of the original slave settlers living today in Gee's Bend. A wonderful Internet source of information on Gee's Bend is the Birmingham Public Library at www.bplonline.org. www.bplonline.org

30. Tuway “His face was covered with irregular white patches. At first, she had thought it was a birthmark, but upon further inspection she had seen that his coloring was like this all over.”

31. What about Tuway? You might look at Tuway as the universal misfit--plain and simple--as we all cope first with what we are before we see or take advantage of our larger implications or impacts. Before he is a symbol of anything else, he is a misfit in a world that does not look like he does. To him perhaps this takes precedence over his blackness, his role as son, employee, lover, etc. He lives day to day in his own skin and copes with it.

32. What about Tuway? Black people had been assigned an unmanageable task---that of being subservient and accommodating while at the same time being told they were free and independent and must fend for them selves, while being denied the tools--legal, economic, and educational--to accomplish this.