The World as Seen Through a Child’s Eyes : Books: Dori Sanders uses a 10-year-old black girl as the central character in her “growing-up-in-the-South” novel.

Victims of a too-warm winter and a too-late frost, the peaches were injured again, so last fall Dori Sanders did as she had done before. She left South Carolina and came north to set up tables for Christmas parties and arrange chairs for wedding receptions.

It always goes like that. When bad weather hits York County, S.C., you can find her at this small motel near Andrews Air Force Base, Md., in her solid shoes and pink polo shirt with the restaurant logo, saving her farm by lugging furniture.

But by May she’s usually long gone, her tables and chairs moved and her money made. This year, however, is different. The peach farmer and assistant banquet manager at the Best Western State Inn (“a gofer really,” she says) is now the novelist. This trip is not a matter of arranging tables or saving peach farms. This trip is about fancy New York publishing lunches and book signings in Potomac and lectures at Spelman College and interviews in Chicago and Detroit.

“It’s just so, so wonderful,” says the author of “Clover,” a lovingly reviewed novel about a 10-year-old black girl growing up on a South Carolina peach farm. “I wake up in the morning and say, ‘Is this really me?’ ”

Her former self never considered traveling to Chicago or Boston. Sanders was raised on her father’s farm, a place she proudly describes as one of the oldest black-owned farms in the county.

Her father was principal of a segregated elementary school in York (population around 8,000) as well as a farmer, and by now most of his children have left the land, moving on to college and careers and lives far from the peaches and sweet potatoes. But despite being a voracious reader, Dori did not go to college. Number eight out of 10 children, she kept coming back to the farm. Her tastes and habits are, she says, those of “country people,” and even when she lived in various Southern cities she returned every summer.

She is now at lunch, being served by a motel colleague and playfully delighted by the honor. But much as she admires the chef, she inspects each course as it arrives. She is pleased by what she sees, which is not how she felt recently when confronted by an assortment of mysterious and trendy objects in a New York salad.

“The only kind of lettuce I really like is iceberg,” she says. “And there wasn’t any iceberg at all. Some of the things in this salad looked like flowers, and then there were these endives, or whatever you call them. I saw red cabbage, but I was told, ‘No, Dori, it’s not red cabbage, it’s raaadicchiooo!’ ” She says the word in a tone so ornately refined it requires her to lift her chin elegantly and purse her mouth into a mere dot, and then she laughs. Among many other benefits, this book tour has added immeasurably to her store of accents.

“If I’m around you five seconds, I sponge up your speech,” she says. “Get me out of the South for a minute and my voice changes. It’s pure affectation of course. I’ve been playacting my entire life. And in a family with 10 children, you have a built-in audience.”

Dori Sanders at 55 is an engine that runs perpetually high. From the instant of meeting to the moment of departure she is talking and laughing and telling stories and commenting on her stories and complimenting the chef and imitating his accent and asking questions and forgetting words and remembering them and laughing again.

She never does only one thing. Striding into an empty room, she reaches down automatically and without slowing picks up a tiny speck of something or other besmirching the floor. Reliable sources say she finally slows around dusk when her body, so used to rising and setting with the sun, rebels, but after a brief slump (or perhaps a brief nap taken sitting up) she revives and continues.

It was that same energy that got her writing. She began with verbal snippets, brief descriptions of memories and sensations that she jotted down on motel cocktail napkins and old menus, which she then left lying around for anyone to stumble across. The person who stumbled across them repeatedly was Nancy Shulman, who owns the motel and for 10 years has allowed Sanders the freedom of working part time whenever necessary. Shulman was impressed and encouraged Sanders to continue writing, which she did until she had an entire novel.

“It was more or less like a Gothic romance, only set in the deep South” is how Sanders describes that book. When she was done, much to her own surprise, Sanders found herself contacting Algonquin Press of Chapel Hill, N.C., a publisher she had read about in a newspaper, and sending off her manuscript.

“I figured, ‘He’s in North Carolina, they can’t be so big!’ ” she says. “New York--I wouldn’t have had the nerve. I wouldn’t have sent it to New York. So I made a phone call, can you believe it? I just called.”

And--can you believe it?--the publisher responded.

“Don’t ever tell me there are no nice editors in the world,” Sanders says, as if some people have tried to tell her just that.

Algonquin publisher and editorial director Louis D. Rubin knew that he did not want to publish Sanders’s submission, but he was struck by the grace with which she used language.

“It was well-written in terms of what happened and everything, but it could have been written around 1900 by someone like Charles Chestnutt or Paul Lawrence Dunbar,” he says. “It had that kind of melodramatic plot. It was as if Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison and Zora Neale Hurston (influential black writers who helped expand the field) had never existed.

“But I wrote her back--I don’t usually do that if we’re not going to take a book,” he says. “But in this case she wrote a nice letter, and I said, ‘Why not think about writing something you know, your own experience?’ I thought that would prove the end of it, but lo and behold a year later in comes this manuscript and she had done just that.”

What she wrote was “Clover.” This is how it starts:

They dressed me in white for my daddy’s funeral. White from my head to my toes. I had the black skirt I bought at the six-dollar store all laid out to wear. I’d even pulled the black grosgrain bows off my black patent leather shoes to wear in my hair. But they won’t let me wear black.

I know deep down in my heart you’re supposed to wear black to a funeral. I guess my stepmother is not totally dressed in black because she just plain doesn’t know any better.

“They dressed me in white for my daddy’s funeral,” Rubin says slowly, as if repeating the first sentence is enough to explain his admiration.

Clover Hill, age 10, tells her own story in that straightforward language of children that veers from deadpan simplicity to crystalline poetry and back again. Her widowed father, an elementary school teacher in contemporary South Carolina, dies only hours after marrying a white woman, and Clover is left in the woman’s care. The volume is short and physically tiny, a delicate thing with a pretty flowered cover, and the story is equally quiet. “Subtle,” Louis Rubin calls it.

“It’s so evenhanded, that’s what is so remarkable about it,” he says. “It doesn’t take sides. I was a little worried before it got published that she might have some problems, writing out of a small-town black experience, that the book might not seem angry or militant enough, that people might object because it doesn’t crusade. But it does it, so very subtly.”

There is tension and pettiness, pain and misunderstanding as Clover’s family mourns and the white woman and the black world meet, but “Clover” remains a warm and hopeful book.

Sanders too has worried that some may see her book as overly optimistic, and she rushes to defend it even before there is a sign she should.

“I grew up in a segregated society. I went to a segregated school and didn’t drink from the water fountain at the courthouse. But my father was both a landowner and a teacher and he was very well respected. And all farmers are affected by the weather, so if you need help to harvest before a storm, you call in the other farmers, you don’t think black or white.

“If I write from the view that things can work out between the races it’s because I’m drawing on my youth. The differences in “Clover’ are not so much a matter of color but cultural and culinary--that’s Clover’s main concern, whether someone can cook grits well or someone doesn’t want a wake in the house.”

And for Sanders, cultural and culinary differences are merely differences, obstacles to be overcome rather than unbreachable barriers. She knows that city people tend to be skeptical of such a view, just as a certain New York cabdriver was stunned that she had in fact heard of “Jeopardy.”

“I told him, ‘Brace yourself! This is going to be a shock, but we have television on the farm!’ ” There were other things on the farm too, like a father who insisted that the table should always be covered with a clean cloth, who named one son Orestus and taught every one of his children to enunciate “Yes, sir.”

“My father was very formal,” she says. “My mother called him ‘Mr. Sanders,’ and he called her a pet name--’Sugar.’ Oh, she honored him; we all did.”

It was that Mr. Sanders upon whom she based Clover’s father, Gaten Hill. Because she wanted Gaten Hill to be a college graduate, she researched colleges in the library before choosing Clemson for him. Like her father, the character has some stern formality to him, but he and his brother, Jim Ed, are also loving and humorous figures.

“Someone said, why did I seem to tend to give the male that kind of image,” she says, and answers, “That’s what I know.”

“There is not a single monolithic black experience. You rarely see that there are black middle class farmers, and there have been for ages. People feel that everything is Oh-So-Terrible in the South. There is only one side of the South printed. When I speak of my South as being the kind that it was and it doesn’t measure up to other people’s image of the South, that doesn’t mean it’s not true. It doesn’t make me a Pollyanna-brighten-the-corner-where-you-are.”

She is far less a Pollyanna than an enthusiast. Everything delights her, from the small basket carved from a ripe tomato by the hotel chef to the beautiful rocks on her land to the customers who stop by the roadside stand she operates in the summer. Some of those customers showed up at a Charlotte, N.C., book party for “Clover,” bringing with them watermelon rind pickle and peach preserves they had made from fruit she had sold them.

The 10-year-old Clover takes the same pleasure in life, whether the object be her father or a bird or a meal.

Everybody knew something was bad wrong with Gaten when he wouldn’t eat. At Sunday’s dinner Gaten didn’t eat chicken or rib one. Wouldn’t even eat a spoonful of Everleen’s banana pudding. I could have eaten the whole thing by myself. She puts Cool Whip on top instead of that egg white stuff. They said Gaten was in L.O.V.E.

Sanders remembers her own 10th year as a time of great happiness, and in creating Clover hoped to find out what it would be like to be that child again. “Ten is something that is so special. Even if you don’t play with them, you can still appreciate a doll. It’s when you can really appreciate childhood--you’re about to lose it, but you hold on for a moment.”

“Clover” has been optioned by Disney, which means it may become a movie. Sanders knows how she will spend whatever profit there is. “What would a person do if she made money?” she asks for dramatic emphasis. “I’d buy new tractor tires. If anything happens from this book, that’s what I want to do.”