Description: At the University of Georgia in 1962, the penultimate year for U.S. segregation, the Black "houseboy" of a Jewish sorority was accused of sexually assaulting an elderly white housemother. Asked by an attorney to serve as a character witness for the defendant, all sorority members involved, with the exception Judy Goldman, declined, meaning Goldman, the sorority's president, was the only white person to testify on the accused's behalf--against her housemother and despite repeated warnings from the community. Sixty years after the trial, Goldman set out to locate the trial's defense attorney, obtain court transcripts, rediscover the past, and learn exactly what happened to the man on trial. The result is a lesson about race--and about how memory can hoodwink us with an image of who we think we were versus who we were; how time can allow us to be finally reintroduced to ourselves.
Brief description: JUDY GOLDMAN is the author of nine books. Her work has appeared in USA Today, The Washington Post, LitHub, The Southern Review, Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, and Prairie Schooner, among others, and many anthologies. A finalist for the Southern Book Prize in nonfiction and in fiction, she has won the Sir Walter Raleigh Award, the Hobson Award for Distinguished Achievement in Arts and Letters, the Fortner Writer and Community Award, and the Lifetime Achievement Award from Central Piedmont Community College, among others. A native of Rock Hill, South Carolina, she lives in Charlotte.