"It is 1946, and city-bred Laura McAllan is trying to raise her children on her husband's Mississippi Delta farm when two young men return from the war to work the land. Jamie McAllan, Laura's brother-in-law, is everything her husband is not--charming, handsome, and haunted by the memories of combat. Ronsel Jackson, eldest son of the black sharecroppers on the farm, has come home a hero, but is still considered less than a man in the Jim Crow South."--Publisher...

Lawyer Penn Cage goes up against a mix of murder, racial tension, double-crosses, illicit sex--and all of the ensuing violent consequences in the kudzu-strangled, snake- rat- and armadillo-infested hole of the Devil's Punchbowl.

Set in 1982, in rural, racially divided Ricksville, Mississippi, Wade in the Water tells the story of Ella, a black, unloved, precocious eleven-year-old, and Ms. St. James, a mysterious white woman from Princeton who appears in Ella’s community to carry out some research. Soon, Ms. St. James befriends Ella, who is willing to risk everything to keep her new friend in a town that does not want her there. The relationship between Ella and Ms. St. James,...

The story of one African American family fighting to stay together and strong in the face of brutal racist attacks, illness, poverty, and betrayal in the Deep South of the 1930s.