My Sweet Vidalia

Vidalia Lee Kandall just wants someone to love who’ll love her back.

Seventeen and pregnant in rural Georgia she drops out, just shy of graduating, to marry JB Jackson despite more forebodings than she can count.

On July 4, 1955, an act of violence threatens the life of Vidalia’s pre-born but, even in and of those direst of circumstances, the spirit of the lost child chooses to remain.

For as long as she is needed, through multiple pregnancies, through abject poverty, through spousal abuse and additional betrayals, Cieli Mae, the determined spirit child, narrates this atypical mother-daughter journey.

Serving as a safe place and sounding board for her ill-equipped young momma’s innermost thoughts and confusions, she lends a strength to Vidalia’s emerging voice. Cieli Mae provides her own special brand of comfort and encouragement, all the while honoring the restrictions imposed by her otherworldly status.

Vidalia finds further support in such unlikely townsfolk and relations as Doc Feldman, Gamma Gert and her Wild Women of God, and most particularly, in Misses Ruby Pearl Banks, the kind, courageous church lady, who has suffered her own share of heartache in their small Southern town of yesteryear’s prejudices and presumptions.

My Sweet Vidalia is wise and witty, outstanding for its use of vibrant, poetic language and understated Southern dialect, as well as Mantella’s clear-eyed observations of “race relations” as “human relations," a cast of unforgettable characters, an in-depth exploration of the ties that bind, and its creative perspective. My Sweet Vidalia is a rare, wonderful, and complex look at hope, strength, the unparalleled power of unconditional love, and a young mother’s refusal to give up.