Her Own Place

by Judy Ausley

Her peach stand has been a stopover for many generations in the state’s rural farming history. This friendly woman, with the wide smile and bits of wisdom flowing from her lips as sweet as the peaches she grows, never meets a stranger.

The farm remains one of the largest African-American farms in the region and has been in her family since 1916. Dori and a brother, who still farm the land, have seen it necessary to carry on this beloved family tradition in the ways taught to them as children by their father, the late M.S. Sanders. The younger Sanders siblings grow Georgia Bell and Elberta peaches known the state over.

The eighth of 10 children, Sanders has spent most of her adult life managing the business and writing every chance she gets. She often sits at the old tree stump near the stand with pen and pad in hand, jotting notes to assemble later into her latest work. “This life is what I do, I never wanted to do anything else and never would I leave this land,” she says proudly. Busy during a summer’s day at the stand, she talks freely about how her father influenced her to become a writer.

“The land was my home and my father nourished the kettle by encouraging me to be a constant reader from the time I knew what a book was,” she says. Her latest book, which she expects to finish later in the year, is about her father. “M.S. Sanders inspired all of his children to read and learn,” she says. He was, in the early years of her life, a rural elementary schoolteacher.

She recalls her father riding the horse and buggy to the school where he later became principal. “He drilled the love of reading books into all of us young’uns,” she says. “I guess I started writing also because I wanted to leave a legacy to my nieces and nephews as a way to tell them about their heritage and the history of this place.”

“I am afraid this generation of children and young adults has ambitions other than the family farm, but I want them to have their history,” Sanders says. She often daydreams about what will happen to the farm after she and her siblings are gone.

The farm is filled with sweet memories on each acre. There is even a place on the property she calls the storytelling rock, where, as little children, she and her siblings would often sit in the cool for hours telling each other stories. Sanders says those childhood moments led to many words for much of her published work.

Her first and noted book, “Clover,” told the story of a young girl’s experience growing up in the rural South. She received the Lillian Smith Award when the book was published in 1990. After that came “Her Own Place,” about a woman buying a farm and working the land. Sanders most recently released “Dori Sanders’ Country Cooking: Recipes and Stories From the Family Farm Stand.” Not only is Sanders a superb cook, she can come up with recipes you and your mother have never heard of. Many South Carolina cooks drive all the way to Filbert to see Dori and hear a special recipe like her Bourbon-laced Tipsy Chicken and Peaches.

Dori’s cookbook is filled with bits of cultural wisdom, like an old story about fixing box suppers. The women in the story prepare identical but unidentified boxes of fried chicken, biscuits, pieces of cake and pie. The young men make their bids, and the cooks are revealed. Bidders just may end up going home with a good meal and a date. This story has turned into true courtship more than once, Sanders says, and at many social functions in the country.

The granddaughter of a freed slave, Sanders now travels to colleges and universities lecturing and teaching creative writing courses. Her lectures are reminiscent of her father’s teaching the importance of reading to young children and to those less fortunate. Dori’s motto is simple – every child must read.

Sanders spoke recently at the 7th Annual Southern Foodways Symposium in Oxford, Mississippi on the 40th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act. Her speech,“Promised Land: A Farmer Remembers” is about farming and the importance of sharing food from the land. “Food is universal, a must for survival. Farming unites and, importantly, it nourishes the body and soul,” she said. Sanders worries about what will become of the family farms in today’s changing world. The future of the family farm may be uncertain, but for now, she fills her days by maintaining the tradition of the way of life she loves.

© 2007 South Carolina Magazine. To read more articles in South Carolina Magazine, click here

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