The Secret of Gumbo Grove

The Secret of Gumbo Grove (1987) is a mystery intended for a middle-grade readership. Written by children’s author Eleanora E. Tate, the novel is set in 1980s South Carolina and features a preteen African-American sleuth trying to uncover the hidden history of her small town. Through her relationship with an elderly resident, the protagonist learns details about life for black people during the Jim Crow era and the early civil rights movement.

Twelve-year-old Raisin Stackhouse is growing up in Gumbo Grove, a small Myrtle Beach town in the late 1980s. Raisin loves history, but her school’s American History class has a dissatisfying problem: almost none of the notable figures her textbook writes about are black. Even the local history module seems to omit important black people from the town’s past.

After school, Raisin likes to do odd jobs for Miss Effie Pfluggins, the elderly church secretary who tells Raisin long stories about the past. Through her, Raisin hears what it was like before the strides made by the civil rights movement: during segregation, black people not only couldn’t eat in the same restaurants or use the same bathrooms as whites, but they even couldn’t do things like try on clothes or shoes. As Miss Effie explains, black people would simply have to buy shoes without ever having put them on—and if they didn’t fit, there was no way to return them.



One day, Miss Effie asks Raisin to help her with a longer-term project: cleaning up the cemetery connected to an old, abandoned church. The church burned down in the decades after the Civil War, and its cemetery has fallen into disrepair. Raisin is excited at the idea of exploring the old gravestones, but her mother and other people in Gumbo Grove worry about Miss Effie’s effusive love of bringing up the past. As Raisin learns, many of her family members and neighbors would rather avoid talking about the painful and tragic past of black people in America.

While cleaning the graves, Miss Effie tells Raisin about some of the people buried there. For example, Sarvis Exile fought to hold onto his land when a local lawyer and judge tried to intimidate him into giving it up for $1,000 rather than the millions that it was really worth. When Exile resisted, the would-be buyers colluded with the KKK to burn down his house to force him out.

Increasingly fascinated, Raisin gets Miss Effie to give her the old church’s records, which have some information about the people in the cemetery. One name catches Raisin’s eye: “Gumbo” Dickson, who seems to have been extremely important at the beginning of the town’s history. But the more questions Raisin asks—like, why does his name match that of the town? And, could this African American man have been the town’s founder?—the more unwilling the townspeople are to discuss Dickson.



Raisin’s parents are increasingly worried about their daughter’s growing obsession, and neighbors agree. The bossy Miss Aussie plain refuses to admit that some of the people buried in the cemetery are her ancestors. Meanwhile, others are worried that the town’s white residents will react poorly to the information that a black man founded Gumbo Grove. Eventually, only one person besides Miss Effie understands and sympathizes with Raisin’s point of view: Big Boy, a girl who begins the novel as a bully but turns out to have a soft interior when she realizes that Raisin is trying to get the townspeople to value their own history rather than trying to pretend it doesn’t exist.

Raisin takes it upon herself to persevere in the face of opposition. She makes a set of oral-history tapes by interviewing the town’s oldest residents and then sneaks out at night to work on the cemetery after her parents ground her. This means that she can’t participate in the Miss Ebony Calvary County Pageant for the “young, gifted, and black,” but she does save the cemetery from Miss Aussie, who would rather simply destroy it.

The novel ends with most of the townspeople realizing the importance of what Raisin has managed to accomplish: uncovering the key black historical figures that should make the community of Gumbo Grove proud. She receives a community service award for her work, and her impressive achievement creates a newfound sense of pride in her family, her neighbors, and the town as a whole.