In Jordan’s stunning debut, prejudice takes many forms, both subtle and brutal. It is 1946 and city-bred Laura McAllan is trying to raise a family on her husband’s Mississippi Delta farm — a place she finds foreign and frightening. In the midst of their struggles, two sons return from the war to work the land. Jamie McAllan, Laura’s brother-in-law, is everything her husband is not — charming, handsome, yet haunted by his memories of combat. Ronsel Jackson, eldest son of the sharecroppers who live on the McAllan farm, has returned to the land of Jim Crow with the shine of a war hero. But no matter his bravery in the defense of his country, he is still barely an ex-slave in the South. It is the unlikely friendship of these brothers-in-arms that drives this powerful novel to its inexorable conclusion. As the men and women of each family relate the incidents as they see them, we are drawn into their lives as each becomes a player in a tragedy on the grandest scale.
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