It’s a tale of love. It’s a tale of race relations. It’s a tale with a message that still rings true today.
Oxford author Margaret Jane Stoddard’s 123-page novel entitled The Leopard’s Changing Spots: Rorey’s Men was recently published and is available on-line at www.Xlibris.com.
Set in the turbulent years of 1958 through 1972, the 50,000-word novel tells the story of Rorey, the liberal daughter of an “old family” in Marshall, Michigan, who enters the University of Michigan and eventually falls in love with two men from very different worlds.
Scott is a white, conservative geology professor, whom Rorey marries and lives with happily until DuMond appears on the scene.
Through her involvement in the fictional Youth for Civil Rights movement on campus, Rorey meets DuMond, a black campus recruiter for National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
DuMond is determined to find a place in the white world and falls in love with Rorey.
Against her husband’s wishes, Rorey, five months pregnant, participates in the famous Aug. 28, 1963 March on Washington, the first large-scale integrated protest march. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech during the march.
The events thereafter lead to the breakup of the couple’s marriage and Rorey’s romance with DuMond.
Inspired by the Integration/Civil Rights movement she witnessed, Stoddard, 93, said she wrote the book in late 1960s and early 1970s, but never published it.
The novel sat in storage for three decades until Stoddard stumbled upon it while rummaging through her boxes upon boxes of written material, shredding material she didn’t want anymore.
“I said I’ll read it once more and see if it’s worth keeping,” she said. “And you know what? I sat down to read it and I couldn’t stop.”
Stoddard sent a copy of the story to her daughter, Lois Stoddard, in New York.
“She called me and said, ‘Well mother, I can’t put it down either,” Stoddard said. “She took over and got the book published and marketed.”
“I think it’s a fantastic story, a beautiful story,” Lois said. “It’s a great story. It’s not violent. It makes you feel good while reading it. And it has a happy ending. It documents a very exciting time in recent history.”
“I must have read it 10 times so far,” Lois added.
Lois said she got the story published to “inspire” her “to keep writing” and publish the “volumes and volumes” of works her mother wrote over her very long life.
When asked what was the main message of her novel, Stoddard replied, “Just as the Ethiopian cannot change his color, nor the Leopard change his spots, we can’t change our skin colors so we have to accept each other and get along.”
Stoddard’s book is available in trade paperback for $17.84, hard cover for $27,89 and eBook for $8.
To order a copy, log on to www.Xlibris.com. Or ask your local bookstore to order it.