Last Heir: A Memoir

Laurie Shoemaker traces six generations of her family who lived in the same South Carolina plantation house built in the 1850s in this memoir chronicling life from the Civil War to the Great Depression and beyond. An Excerpt: "e;Hey, guys, y'all need to come out here on the porch. It's cooler and there are a million stars."e; Before I finish the sentence, bodies start drifting out. Some lounge on the enormous stone steps, others fill up wicker and rocking chairs. For a moment, no one speaks. They are drinking it all in, the perfumed night, the cloudless firmament, a symphony of pastoral sounds both near this place we call home and far away down the roads and in the fields. Sons and daughters of Liz and Joe, of the Browns and Sloans and Chalmers, relax on the sturdy, broad-beamed porch our ancestors built. There is tranquility in the fresh country air, our individual, unspoken pain salved by the velvet night. Brown eyed Joseph, his grandfather's namesake asks, "e;What will become of all this?"e;