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My thesis will be a piece of historical fiction based on the life of the fortune teller, Mayhayley Lancaster. Ms. Lancaster lived in west Georgia in the early 20th century and was visited from people all over the region. Known for her accuracy in helping people find lost items, people, and animals, she was known as a “oracle.” Lancaster had other pursuits. She attended law school, ran for public office, farmed and traded mules, and was a teacher. She travelled around Georgia and Alabama telling fortunes as well as buying up land on the courthouse steps that was being sold in weekly tax sales. Through her savvy business style, she amassed a fortune of her own. My connection to this real-life character comes from my own family story in which my grandmother went to visit Mayhayley. My grandmother was in her twenties and was working for the Farmers Home Administration. Mayhayley told her that she would marry a man named “Isaac,” but my grandmother did not know anyone with that name. She was however, dating a man named “Bill” who she worked with. They dated in secret because they were co-workers. Grandmother dismissed her visit to Mayhayley and was convinced she was a charlatan. Bill went off to WWII and Grandmother continued to work, going on to test ammunition during the war. When Bill came back the two were married. At some point, Grandmother realized that Bill’s full name was “William Isaac Barnes” and his family called him “Isaac.” It took years for Grandmother to recall her fleeting visit with Mayhayley. In the end my grandparents were married for sixty years. I hope to take stories like this one and other oral histories that are out there on Mayhayley and turn them into a chronology of historical fiction pieces that trace her life as well as the changing landscape of the South during the time she was alive. I would also like to take the stories into the modern era and look at how Mayhayley may still be impacting families in the South. For example, one oral history has Mayhayley telling a man that there was confederate gold buried on his property in a cast iron stove. This man confessed this information to his family on his death bed, but by then the property had been sold, and the family could do nothing but keep the information secret. I aim to turn tales like these into a work of fiction set in the modern world with modern struggles rural Southerners deal with in regard to the changing economic and environmental landscape. I am excited to explore these stories and the genre of historical fiction as I immerse myself in Mayhayley’s life and the life of my own people during this time in history.
