Wow. I like this! In the midst of your descriptive work, you still manage to give us background and things. Nice.

My favorite line was "on unsteady foot"; Nice word choice there, definitely.

"The beauty of the southern women were beyond comparison." This bit seems a little awkward to me - first of all, I think you should use was instead of were. The beauty was, not the beauty were. That sounds better.

Your sentence fluency seemed a little awkward to me. It just didn't flow as well as it could have; rewording a couple sentences, lengthening some and shortening others should do it. It wasn't too bad.

Ashe