Ask the Author: Jim Barber
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Jim Barber
The idea for Plowed Fields occurred early in my newspaper career when I covered the resignation of a bedridden sheriff in middle Georgia. This particular sheriff had a reputation for trampling the civil rights of black citizens. A few weeks before his resignation, I had reported on a demonstration against the sheriff by a group of black citizens who felt vindicated by the man’s stroke and clamored for his resignation. After covering the resignation, which was hard on his family and supporters, I was driving back home. It was a beautiful spring day in the middle of the week, and I remember the wild yellow buttercups and purple flowers on the side of the road. The idea for Plowed Fields just came to me in full-blown detail as I was soaking up all that beauty and thinking about what I just witnessed. I was intrigued by the rage and helplessness felt by both sides—the sheriff’s supporters and his opponents. But it was the idea of people caught in the middle of something beyond their control that planted the seed for Plowed Fields. On Saturday morning of that week—this was 1985 and my wife was working on Saturdays—I went into our spare bedroom, sat down at the desk and mapped out the storyline and the characters for the book. It took me roughly a decade to write Plowed Fields, but the story tracks incredibly close to that initial outline.
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