New Harmony: A Mother’s Story of Love and Loss
by Leon E. Pettiway

New Harmony finds its soulfulness in the struggles and victories woven into Southern life, shaped by the complexities of race, sexuality, and gender in New Harmony, South Carolina. At its core is Margaret Butler, a deeply spiritual Black woman born in 1905, who bears the echoes of her enslaved ancestors and the grief of her murdered sixteen-year-old son, Thad. Through Margaret’s perspective, New Harmony becomes both an elegy and a reckoning, reflecting on faith and fury, bigotry and beauty, while highlighting the violence that wounds and the love that endures.

Through Margaret’s soulful narration, which is rich in dialect and steeped in wisdom, love, and loss, the story unfolds against the haunting backdrop of a young Black boy’s death in a town that dares to call itself New Harmony. New Harmony explores the delicate balance of normalcy within the paradoxes of hatred—how hatred intertwines with desire, love, and greed until each emotion becomes indistinguishable from the others. Desire fuels Floyd’s dangerous clash with Margaret, yet it also sets the stage for questionable parentage. Love also provokes a hatred so intense that it justifies murder, while greed leads to framing the innocent. Yet, beneath everything, hatred runs through New Harmony as an unspoken truth, creating a current that affects everyone’s lives. The story that unfolds is one of revelation and reckoning, where the truth behind the murders shows not only how some people confuse hatred for love but also fail to consider the fragile humanity of those left behind.