The Last Hotel For Women
of Civil Rights-era Birmingham into the already complicated fabric of one
white family's life.
On Mother's Day, 1961, a busload of freedom riders arrived
in Birmingham, Alabama, from "up North." A group of angry white men, including
members of the Ku Klux Klan, armed with pipes and clubs, greeted them.
Life in this most segregated of southern cities would never be the same.
It is to this pivotal moment that novelist Vicki Covington returns.
Birmingham crackles with tension--at the foundry where
Pete, Dinah Fraley's husband, works; on the baseball field where white
and black company teams uneasily take turns; and most of all in Dinah's
hotel, where Commissioner of Public Safety Bull Connor holds court just
as he did when Dinah's mother ran the place as a bordello. When Dinah takes
in a freedom rider injured in the Mother's Day melee, the conflicts within
and beyond her well-ordered world reach a crisis point.
Firmly grounded in Alabama's physical, social, and cultural landscape, The Last Hotel
for Women revisits a painful moment in the South's past and allows
Covington to redeem its collective history with a story of grace and hope.
Vicki Marsh Covington is the author of four novels, Gathering Home, Bird of
Paradise, Night Ride Home, and The Last Hotel for Women. Most
recently, she is coauthor of Cleaving: The Story of a Marriage,
a memoir written with her husband, writer Dennis Covington. The Covingtons
live in Birmingham, Alabama.
