A Bedouin at the Window: Readings from "The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia"

Mary Helen Stefaniak

Date:	02-01-2012
Time:	6:00 pm to 7:00 pm
Location:	Wolstein Building Auditorium
Registration:	Registration is Closed.

Author Mary Helen Stefaniak will read from and talk about her Anisfield-Wolf-award-winning novel, The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia (W. W. Norton & Company). Most of the novel takes place in 1938-39, when a well-traveled new schoolteacher turns the little town of Threestep, Georgia, upside down. Miss Spivey not only abandons the prescribed curriculum, providing a few dozen white children with a more worldly and inclusive education; she also reinvents the town's annual festival as a Baghdad Bazaar, complete with camels. But neither Miss Spivey nor the narrator, young Gladys Cailiff, her student and ardent fan, is the hero of the novel. That role belongs to the Cailiffs' 17-year-old African-American neighbor, Theo Boykin. Theo, who is known to all as the smartest person in Piedmont County, soon becomes Chief Engineer and creative genius behind the Baghdad Bazaar. He makes dangerous enemies in the process. Stefaniak will alternate readings from the novel with stories of the surprising research that led her to "discover" a real-life ancestor for her fictional hero in the person of Bilali Mahomet, a literate African Muslim enslaved first in the Bahamas and then on Sapelo Island, Georgia. Bilali Mahomet was famous in his lifetime for his intelligence, his Muslim faith, and his abilities as plantation overseer and leader of men.

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Click HERE to view the Event Video.

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Cosponsored with:

Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, Cuyahoga Arts and Culture