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Southern belle, Sarah Booth Delaney, a 30-something, single, unemployed actress, is trying to figure out how to keep the family plantation, Dahlia House, in Zinnia. Mississippi, when an old schoolmate, Tinkie Bellcase Richmond, carrying her little dog, Chablis, comes for a visit. Tinkie wants Sarah to find out if Hamilton Garrett V, a handsome, wealthy landowner who had left town after the death of his parents, is the one Madame Tomeeka, (really Tammy Odum, black contemporary of the two „Daddy¼s Girls¾) told her is the dark man returning to town. Jitty, the ghost of Sarah¼s great-grandmother¼s nursemaid, talks to Sarah, the last of the Delaney¼s. Jitty, who had been a slave, and who died in 1904, is a hoot. She convinces Sarah Booth to dognap Chablis and then arrange to find her and collect the ransom. „Cha-blis. What kind of person names a dog after a man in a book who dresses like a woman. Cha-blis¾ whispers Jitty, who changes her hairdo and period of clothing daily,reads women¼s magazines, watches Oprah, and advises Sarah. The plan works out even better than they had hoped, and Tinkie pays Sarah even more money to find out some other facts for her. Another of the Daddy¼s Girls hires Sarah Booth to take care of something else that is very confidential. The plantation is saved. Sarah doesn¼t have to marry the banker who is courting her, and she has a new source of income. Perhaps she can save the plantation after all. Haines writes wittily of a South that should have died but really hasn¼t; where women of a certain class are brought up to be dainty helpless creatures, and a hunting accident is an honorable way of committing suicide. But it¼s also a South that is understood by those who grew up there; a kind of small town life where everyone in town knows everyone else and where personality quirks are accepted and where everyone lives by a code unbroken by outsiders, even after all these years.
Reviewed by Barbara Franchi, November 2001
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