Wanderer from the Delta

About the Book

Keith Somerville Dockery McLean has been through two world wars, 18 U.S. presidencies, the Jazz Age and the Great Depression, the onset and demise of Prohibition, the birth of women’s suffrage, the evolving Civil Rights movement, the land, air, and space ages, the assassinations of 1968, and the impeachment of the 1970s, the rise and fall of the USSR and the beginning and the end of the Cold War. Born in a tiny Mississippi town in 1914 to parents ahead of their time in many ways, including their views on racial issues, she grew up with her little sister seeing simultaneously privileged society and the poverty and misery on which it often rested. Her story is a microcosm of that of many Southern American aristocrats of conscience.

After college in New Orleans and Oxford, the intellectually vibrant and beautiful Keith Somerville married an influential and wealthy plantation owner, Joe Rice Dockery, and settled down to their raise three wonderful daughters. Besides infinite joy, they would eventually provide her with many grandchildren and great-grandchildren to love. Extensive travels with her husband widened her view of the world beyond the narrow one of many plantation aristocrats.

A talented pianist, Keith has seen sea changes in painting and sculpture, some in her own collection, and has watched nuclear energy be added to coal and wood. The silent films of her girlhood evolved into the sound and music and color of An American in Paris in the 1950s, three- dimensional films of later years, and contemporary stunners like O Brother, Where Art Thou. Her girlhood was touched by the discovery of penicillin, and her friends have also been saved by open heart surgery. Where cloned sheep will lead she remains to see. She has seen wars fought by cavalry give way to ones decided by hydrogen bombs and has known an age that produced the Holocaust and the birth of Israel. On another level, she has observed the shenanigans of both Wallis Simpson and Monica Lewinsky and their paramours and has watched libraries and typewriters become virtual as well as physical.

After Joe Dockery died, she took over the management of their 7,000 acre plantation, guiding it expertly to further profits, an active, important role not typical of Southern women of the 1980s. Another happy marriage to country lawyer and courtly gentleman G. Hite McLean also ended in widowhood. Keith has suffered her share of losses and blows over the course of her long life, but through it all, her courage and humor makes it easy for her to conclude that she is a “very lucky lady.”

About the Author

Keith Somerville Dockery McLean, born early in the last century in the rural South, lived through the birth of the new millennium. Raised poor in the Depression, she married the wealthy and influential Joe Rice Dockery, raised three daughters on his sprawling rice, cotton, and soybean plantation in the midst of the Civil Rights Revolution, and traveled the world becoming a perceptive observer of events political, historical, and literary. Keith is an avid lifelong reader and a friend to many of the South’s finest artists and writers. Wanderer from the Delta is her first book.