Peach Lit (Fall 2006)

“It was a funeral procession. I saw a little black girl in a lead car, looking very sad. She saw me and lifted her hand and gave me a small wave. Then, that same day just a little while later, another funeral procession came by and that group was all white people. I saw a woman in a lead car, sitting there so sad. She looked back at me as they passed and I shared her sadness,” she says.

“I got to thinking about how death causes such an upheaval in people’s lives, no matter their skin color. I thought and thought about it. I couldn’t get that sad wave of the black girl out of my head. Same with that white woman and how sad she looked. I wondered what would happen if those people wound up together. Could they make a life of it?”

Sanders, who is a natural-born storyteller, felt the urge to write. She found an ink pen but couldn’t locate paper. “I started writing on the back of a wooden peach basket. I pulled that little black girl out and named her Clover. I made that white woman into a woman named Sara Kate. I was well over 50 years old, selling peaches by the side of the road. That’s how my first novel was born,” Sanders says.

Her second novel, Her Own Place, published in 1993, is the story of Mae Lee Barnes’ farming adventures and fierce tie to the land. “There’s a lot of Dori Sanders in Mae Lee,” she says. Sanders next published Dori Sanders’ Country Cooking: Recipes and Stories from the Family Farm Stand, in 1995. Literary success aside, Sanders’ life hasn’t changed a whole lot. She and her brother Orestus still grow 14 varieties of peaches on their land just north of York, S.C., down the road from a village named Clover. Come summer, she still sits in a tattered lawn chair at the roadside peach stand, dispensing advice to visitors on topics ranging from the proper techniques for preparing turnips to family relationships and child-rearing advice to how to grow okra.

“When you buy fresh peaches here, you’re buying from farmers who were growing peaches before you were born, my dear. And here’s Dori Sanders saying she will stand behind these peaches,” she tells a customer. Eighth in a family of 10 children, Sanders was the daughter of a grade school principal who farmed on the side. In that family, books were prized. So was the ability to tell a good story. The children swapped yarns by a huge boulder Sanders calls her “storytelling rock.”

“We’d gather there often to escape doing things. We told wonderful stories there. That’s where I learned to tell a story,” she says. Her stories, like her books, have rural life at their heart. Her life has been wrapped up in a love for the land. “I’ve been a farmer my whole life. Dad taught us the importance of owning land. He said, ‘Land is forever, they’re not making any more.’ As a writer, I’m interested in what hold the land has on people, what pulls you back there to it, sometimes even against your will,” she says.

These days, Sanders continues writing and stays busy with Orestus farming 250 acres of land. “Peaches take a lot of work. It’s hard work, but I love it. Yes, I do,” she says.