Introduction

In stores October 31

In World War II–era Mississippi, the aftermath of a tragedy takes on all the intensity and heat of the Delta summer when the town of Ruleton copes with violence, racism, and a vengeful spree that threatens the life of a young girl and the soul of the small town.

In Hushpuckashaw County in the 1940s, many things are desperately unfair. Letitia Johnson, a young black mother and the nanny for one of the town’s most distinguished couples, knows this only too well when the couple’s baby is found drowned in its bath. Accused by the grieving family and the enraged townspeople, Letitia quickly sends her twelve-year-old daughter, Sally, out to hide in the brush before she is taken into custody. The angry mob would get revenge when they drag Letitia from her jail cell and hang her that very night. But they wouldn’t get Sally.

Baby Allen, a courageous social worker, is assigned to Sally’s case, and gradually coaxes the young girl out of hiding, wins her trust, and secures her protection. But once Sally is safe, Baby is left with the greater mission of uncovering the truth about who is responsible for the infant’s death—a shocking revelation that will change the ways and attitudes of a town that has been long in need of changing.

Beautiful and gripping, Cotton Song is the story of a woman’s fight to save the child left behind after the horrific lynching that took her mother’s life.

Editorial Review

No editorial review at this time.

Excerpt

The road to Ruleton ran dry and dusty. Baby Allen negotiated

the ancient Model T as best she could, the loose gravel

sliding her tires side to side as if she were skating on ice. Though

it was shy of 10:00 a.m. the Mississippi Delta heat already wavered

in gaseous, evil-looking shimmerings before her, ghosting the cotton

fields that stretched to either side of the straight two-lane divide

of U.S. Highway 49. On the horizon the sun squatted—the bloody

yolk of a fat, frying orb.

The story of Letitia Johnson’s lynching plastered the front page

of the Monday, July 17, 1944, edition of the Hushpuckashaw County

Tocsin that lay on the seat beside Baby, beating out the usual headline

designated to naming the local soldiers fighting overseas who’d

been chosen for the Hushpuckashaw County Victory Valiants and

the quotes for farm prices, not to mention the “11 Musts for Peace

Given to Business by the U.S. Chamber” carried by the AP wire,

and the war news of Montgomery’s attack on Gain, below Caen.

Letitia Johnson had worked as the mammy for the Rules, the

founding family of Ruleton. The baby girl of the youngest daughter,

Sissy Rule Tisdale, had been found drowned to death in the bathtub

of their home Friday morning. Sheriff Dodd had arrested Letitia

Johnson on suspicion of infanticide that same afternoon, but before she could even be indicted for the crime she’d been swept away by a

mob and hung. Her body had been tarred and then set on fire. It

burned all night and into the next day. Such acts of vigilantism,

rampant before the 1930s, had grown almost rare since the state had

bought a new portable electric chair, which could be transported

to perform executions in the county where the crime had been

committed, but Letitia Johnson’s grievous act, the paper’s publisher,

L. B. Ware, wrote in an accompanying editorial, had been so

heinous as to “earn the support of the God-fearing public for what

had been done to her. For though we may be against the gruesome

public hangings that have beleaguered the good name of the state of

Mississippi in the recent past, we must be able to entrust the care of

our most valuable treasure, our children, the heirs of all we hold

precious in this world, to the aunties who raised us all.”

The article did not point out that Letitia Johnson had been the

mother of a girl herself, a twelve-year-old daughter. Now that child

was orphaned. Mr. Brumsfield, the director at the welfare, had laid

the responsibility of her file on Baby’s desk. As a county agent, it

was that orphaned girl, Sally Johnson, whom Baby was driving to

Ruleton to find.

On the north side of the hamlet of Boyer, halfway between

Eureka and Ruleton, she was forced to slow before a cloud of dust

that signaled the long line of a chain gang working with picks and

shovels to smooth and grade that stretch of the bumpy highway. The

convicts wore pants and shirts rung around with horizontal black

and white stripes, yellowed with sweat. All the prisoners held at the

state penitentiary, better known as Parchman Farm, were busy

serving years of hard labor for the profit of the state. The majority

of the men worked off their crimes at toil chopping cotton on the

twenty-two thousand acres of fields that made up the old plantationstyle

“farm,” but a few work gangs like this one were contracted out

to labor for the railroad or public works. Leg irons dragged behind

them, and their faces were dripping wet. All eighty or so men at work swinging their picks and shoveling rock were Negroes. The

six men guarding them were Negroes, too, convicts as well. As an

officer of the newly mandated parole system that had fallen under

the auspices of the welfare in Hushpuckashaw County, Baby had

come to recognize these men as trusties. Handpicked to carry guns

by the sergeant who ran each work camp, they stood at a distinct remove

from their fellow prisoners, called gunmen, who worked

within range of their aim—the levered rifles or double-barreled shotguns

the trusties carried trained directly on them. All the while, the

sergeant strode up and down the line, driving them, while a squat,

barrel-chested convict wearing a striped prison cap like a grinder

monkey’s shouted out the chant that paced the rise and fall of their

picks. Baby rolled to a stop, elbow on the edge of the open window,

and leaned her head on her hand at the delay. The swell of the man’s

big voice and the chorus of the call thundered back from every convict

on the line, all at once, and with the gathered umph! and the

ringing strike of their picks.

Ridin’ in a hurry.

Great Godamighty!

Ridin’ like he’s angry.

Great Godamighty!

Well, I wonder whut’s de matter?

Great Godamighty!

Bull whip in one han’, cowhide in de udder.

Baby climbed out to look for the overseer. A dark-green state car

sat tipped at the angle of the ditch in the lane facing her, but no one

was in it. She shaded her eyes with her hand. Before her, in the first

of the three cotton trucks that had been used to transport the convicts,

she spotted khaki trousers attached to a pair of boots sticking

out the window of the opened front door, heels crossed. The boots

showed dusty brown, the soles squashed hard to the outsides. Baby ducked back in the car and pulled up beside the first truck. She had

to lean across the newspaper that was faceup on the passenger seat

to see up into the cab.

“Excuse me. Sir?”

When the man sat up from his nap, wearing dark sunglasses,

pushing back at his hat, Baby recognized Jake Lemaster, Boss Chief ’s

son. Boss Chief was the appellation of authority granted the superintendent

of Parchman Farm, and though Jake Lemaster hadn’t

been branded with such an omnipotent-sounding title at the prison

yet, which Baby took as a good sign, he did have the reputation of

being his daddy’s right-hand man. This was ironic, seeing as how

Jake Lemaster was a one-armed man himself.

“I hate to disturb your sleep, Mr. Lemaster. But some of us have

work to do this morning. I’d like to pass by, if you don’t mind.”

Jake Lemaster peeled off his sunglasses and thumbed the sleep

from his eyes. “Morning to you, Mrs. Allen. Thought I recognized

that dusty old car. I wasn’t sleeping exactly, just resting my eyes.

And how is our local angel of mercy today? On dove’s wings to do

some good up our end of the county, I hope.”

Even for a Mississippian born and bred, Jake Lemaster had a

heavy accent, which he slathered on country thick, sliding in extra

syllables to ease his drawl, his vowels full, and consonants with the

edges rounded off. His “morning” sounded like “ma-haw-nin,” “car”

like “ca-ah.” He was still thin and youngish, though not exactly

young anymore, certainly no boy, although there was still something

boyish about him. He wore his rust-red hair unusually long,

curling out from under the back of his hat, and he remained tall,

broad-shouldered. His fabled freckled left passing arm looked hard

beneath the short-sleeve shirt of his khaki uniform, but she could

see a little pooch over his belt the way he sat hunched in the truck

with his legs bowed out—a drawn pistol, she saw then, resting in his

lap—and he had hard lines drawn down at the edges of his mouth.

Baby had met Jake Lemaster’s father, Boss Chief, exactly once,

on her first visit to the prison. Boss Chief sat tipped back behind his big desk in the living-room-sized office of the Victorian mansion,

called First Home at Front Camp, where he lived and which served

as the administrative center for the prison. When she’d been escorted

into the room, he’d run his yellow eyes up and down her

body, from her legs to her breasts to her face and then back to her

breasts and legs and face, before settling on her hips, never meeting

her eyes. While she spoke, informing him of the state’s new parole

law and what her job would be on her visits to Parchman Farm, he

pivoted his chair to stare out the window, his thick fingers steepled

before him. Nor did he venture to say one word to her during their

entire interview except to acknowledge its conclusion by barking

his son into the room. Boss Chief mumbled in his growl of a voice

to his son, with an accent so guttural and marble-mouthed that

she hadn’t understood one word. But Jake had. He said, “Yes, sir,

Mr. Boss Chief.” With that, Boss Chief had apparently washed his

hands of her, turning over to Jake the responsibility of dealing with

“that woman from the Welfare Department” whenever she made

her visits to see the convicts.

The fact Baby remained sharply aware of was that Boss Chief

was not a professional penologist—nor had the governor appointed

him to act like one. Convicts were sent to Parchman to be punished

for their crimes. At Parchman no distinction was made between ax

murderers and thieves. The cages, as the dormitories in each work

camp were called, had no individual cells. Hardened fifty-year-old

incorrigibles slept side by side with fifteen-year-old first-time offenders.

A mental incompetent was not separated by the state. Insanity

was not recognized as a defense for committing a crime—a

crime was a crime. All the prisoners at Parchman were treated the

same: the common denominator simply that they had all been convicted

as guilty. Reform was not the state’s goal. Boss Chief had

been hired years ago because he was a proven old-style plantation

farmer of the first rank. His qualifications proved he could grow

cotton on an immense scale. He could “handle niggers.” Boss Chief

ran Parchman as if the convicts were slaves in antebellum times and he was their “Marse”—except if a convict died there was no loss for

Boss Chief. Judges from around the state sent the fodder of new

labor Boss Chief ’s way every day in droves, hauled in from the town

and county jails by the white man feared far and wide as Long

Chain Charlie. There seemed no end to the number of men—and

women, too—who shot and knifed and did personal injury and bodily

harm and stole. So there was no real incentive for Boss Chief to

keep the prisoners alive or even well. As a parole officer for the

state, Baby had met men who’d killed and who had been killed, who

were simply no longer available to talk to her when she went back

for their next interview. As a home visitor for the state, she came to

know their families equally well while they served their time in jail.

It was on one of these visits to Parchman Farm that Baby had

worked up the temerity to ask Jake exactly what had happened to

his right arm. She’d heard the common rumor that he’d lost it in

some sort of farm accident. He told her he’d fallen off the back of a

tractor when he was a boy. He said he was lucky the trailing disk

hadn’t diced him to ribbons. The mangled arm had been sawn off

neatly above the elbow. Fortunately, he still had full use of the stub,

which he’d become adept at using like a flipper. And though Baby

was sure the loss of the hand and forearm had cost Jake Lemaster in

more ways than she could imagine, she also knew that as a young

man he’d shown the determination to overcome such a crippling.

He’d risen to play tailback in the single wing for the University of

Mississippi’s championship-bid football team of 1935—the squad

that had taken Ole Miss to its first bowl game. Baby didn’t follow

football, but everyone else in the Delta seemed to. She happened to

remember the facts because everyone had so bemoaned the 20–19

Orange Bowl loss to Catholic University. Still, 1935 had been a great

year for the great state of Mississippi, people said. And Jake Lemaster

was still remembered for the all-American-honors-winning part

he’d played in it. For many, Baby knew, “Red” Lemaster would always

remain the fiery-haired, one-armed captain of the Rebels

who’d been praised by sportswriters for his speed and quick wit—Jake Lemaster was a regular red fox they said—and the color of his

hair had forever sealed their nickname for him.

“Thank you for asking, Mr. Lemaster. Your local angel of mercy

is just fine this morning. Though I’d venture to say it feels more like

afternoon.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “It surely does. ’Cepting it’s going to get

hotter ’fore it gets cooler. You can take that to the bank. Who we

visiting this morning? You heading Parchman way? Daddy didn’t

say anything to me. We expecting you?”

“Not today, Mr. Lemaster. I’m on my way up to Ruleton. I have

an orphaned girl to see.” And then Baby just said it—usually she

wouldn’t have even disclosed that it was an orphan she was going to

visit. That was official welfare business. She didn’t know why she

said it or why in heaven’s name she would say it to Jake Lemaster,

the Boss Chief ’s son, of all people. She couldn’t keep the anger and

bitterness out of her voice either: “Letitia Johnson’s daughter. You

may have read about her mama, Mr. Lemaster.” She waved angrily

down at the newspaper on the seat between them.

Jake Lemaster absorbed her tone and the information with a

straight face, looking directly back at her, the blacked glasses blanking

his expression.

“Now that you mention it, I did hear something about that,” he

said slowly. “Truth be told, Mrs. Allen, that’s all I been hearing

about for three days now. Would you believe, Mrs. Allen, that there

are Christians in Hushpuckashaw County who still stake their faith

on the rock of the Old Testament belief of an eye for an eye and a

tooth for a tooth? The murder of the murderer for such Christians

isn’t enough it seems. Justice must be done. If a child died, such

Christians believe, a child’s life has got to be paid. They believe

that’s the only way to even the scales and set things straight.”

Baby looked carefully back at him. She nodded slowly, believing

she’d heard what Jake Lemaster was trying to tell her—Letitia

Johnson’s daughter was in danger. This horridness wasn’t over yet.

Since Baby had heard about the lynching of Letitia Johnson she’d felt a lot of things, but this was the first time she’d felt the rush of

fear. “I want to thank you for this confidence, Mr. Lemaster.”

When she said that, Jake Lemaster’s face changed again. He

leaned forward and tipped down his glasses to look at her with his

sky-blue eyes. He stretched a flat smile.

“My ‘confidence,’ as you call it, Mrs. Allen, is nothing more

than a statement of fact. You best understand that. What we’re having

ourselves here is merely a theological discussion.” He pushed his

sunglasses up the bridge of his nose, blacking his light eyes from her

again.

He stood on the running board of the truck. “Joe!” he called and

waved his pistol for the trusties to hold back the line of gunmen so

that she could pass.

The shooters shuffled the chained convicts at gunpoint into two

raggedy lines across the drainage ditches on either side of the highway.

Baby glanced back up at Jake Lemaster, but he was focused on

the line. She put both hands on the wheel. “Good day, Mr. Lemaster.”

She faced forward and let off the clutch.

As she drove slowly between the gauntletlike lines, Baby could

feel the trusties and gunmen looking into the car at her without

looking as if they were looking. Not one of the convicts dared meet

her eye. The sergeant stood close by, Black Annie, his wide, short

strop of a whip, held at his side. From her visits, Baby knew how

bad it was. You did not want to go to Boss Chief ’s Parchman—no,

you did not. The reprisals were legend; murderers were sent to

Parchman, real killers. And if you weren’t a murderer when you

went in, you were a killer for real when you got out, or chances

were you were just plain dead, buried in one of the unmarked graves

for unclaimed prisoners at the swamp edge of the penitentiary. Well you won’t write me, you won’t come and see me.

Oh!

Say you won’t write me, you won’t send no word.

Oh!

Said I get my news from the mockingbird.

Oh!

Said I get my news from the mockingbird.

Oh!

In the rearview mirror, Baby could see Jake Lemaster still standing

on the running board of the cotton truck holding on to the door

with his good arm, pistol in hand, looking after her. His black eyes

stared through the glare. Baby touched her hair, and a shiver ran

down her spine. At the time, she could not have said why.

The dusty road ran another twelve miles before it reached the

outskirts of Ruleton. Though Baby could go as fast as the shaking

Model T would take her now on the open highway, the wind that

grabbed at her did not make her feel one iota cooler. Hushpuckashaw

County hadn’t been blessed with a rain since the end of May.

Her throat felt as parched as the cotton in the fields looked, the mitt

leaves drooping, wilted from thirst, the plants stunted, just kneehigh,

and forced to an early blooming, the yellow and pink flowers

of the budding bolls cast across the rows like a dusky skyful of

bright, hot little stars. Baby flicked on the staticky radio and listened

to a garbled report of the Red Army’s storming of Grodno. It

seemed inevitable now—the war would soon be over; it was merely

a matter of time, though she imagined many more would still die.

Baby wondered what peace would bring home to them. After all the

talk about the country’s struggle against tyranny and subjugation,

the fight for freedom . . . She flicked the radio off.

A rolling trickle of sweat slipped between her breasts, and she

pressed the flat of her hand against the front of her dress, absorbing it into her bra, and dabbed her forehead with a handkerchief. Baby

glanced again at the grainy photograph of Letitia Johnson’s body. It

didn’t look like a body at all really—she looked as if she’d been cocooned,

until you realized that she was burned, charred beyond

human recognition by the fire. The picture was framed by the tree

from which her already hung body had been chained for that final

indignity; the hats and caps of the heads of onlookers could be seen

looking up, tilted back, unidentifiable as their guilt in her murder.

The safety of numbers. Anonymity. No one was to blame. Letitia

Johnson’s murder would go unsolved, of that Baby had no doubt,

and so the question of whether she’d actually done what she’d been

accused of would never even be investigated. She’d been sentenced,

her punishment pronounced and carried out without benefit of a

trial. And so the matter of Sissy Rule Tisdale’s drowned baby girl

would be put to rest. No questions asked. And for that, they were

all of them guilty, she thought. All of us.

Baby slowed and turned left off the gravel onto a dirt road just

outside of the city limits of Ruleton, feeling the sickening, woozy,

light-headedness flash over her again, shifting her off-kilter. Out of

sight of the main road, she pulled over and fumbled at the door’s

latch and stumbled into the field through the cloud of dust she’d

raised, where she leaned as far forward as she could to keep the

string of vomit off her dress. She ended up dry heaving; she had

thrown up in the toilet that morning trying to get ready quietly in

the dark while her girls, Claire and Jeana, slept, and her head was

still swimming. She knew from experience that what she needed

was to eat, but she hadn’t been able to keep any breakfast down, not

even coffee, and there was nothing in her stomach to come up.

There was cold fried chicken and potato salad in a greasy brown bag

on the floorboard of the backseat—leftovers from Sunday dinner

that she’d packed for her lunch—but even the thought of meat

made her retch again. She dabbed at the edges of her mouth with

the handkerchief still clutched in her hand, looking down at the

smear of red lipstick she’d wiped off. Slowly, she straightened. The fried cotton stood in neat rows, raying out like spokes on a

giant wheel from the hub of the point where she stood under a blue

sky. At the end of the horizon a winding, well-watered explosion of

trees, water oaks and cottonwoods, sycamores and locust, willows

and persimmons, lined the banks of the Hushpuckashaw River. She

followed the line with her eye until it came to rest on the weathered

gray of Letitia Johnson’s shack, still tiny in the distance. Baby

dabbed her mouth again and parted the neck of her cotton dress to

try to snare a breeze.

It seemed there was no end to trouble in this life.

“Goddamn you, Gabriel Allen,” she said and felt the dam burst

of tears she’d caught back talking to Jake Lemaster begin to well and

spill. It all came down on her again then. It had been two weeks

since she’d sent her husband packing. Trouble enough that he was

gone and now she had their two girls to raise all on her own, but the

fact that she’d let Gabe get her pregnant again at the age of forty-one

while he was cheating on her with that awful Franks woman drove

her to the brink of distraction.

Baby trudged back to the car, the door left hanging open. She sat

back in the ovenlike cab and pulled her legs inside to fix her lips in

the rearview mirror, reapplying the mask she’d turned to face Jake

Lemaster. She smacked her lips together and put her lipstick back

in her purse. As she shifted the Model T into gear again and started

to drive, she wondered what she’d find at Letitia Johnson’s when

she was let inside. As a visitor for the welfare, she knew: You never

knew what you’d find. She’d learned to expect just about anything

in her official inquiries into other people’s lives and so was no longer

as surprised by the doings of others as she was by her own. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

From the publisher:

1) Discuss the recurring appearance of the red fox at Letitia’s house. Why is the fox associated with this location? Why does the author include such gory details of this same fox collecting the remains of Baby’s unborn child?

2) What do you think of Sissy Rule Tisdale? Is she a sympathetic character? Why do you think the rest of the Rule family seems so absent from her life?

3) What do you think really happened the night Dorothy Tisdale died?

4) Discuss Boss Chief’s philosophy of right and wrong. Whose rules does he follow? How does he see his role as head of Parchman Farm? What factors influenced his chosen path?

5) What, if anything, is the significance of the song lyrics throughout the book? Did you find them meaningful?

6) Discuss the contrast between Alley Leech, whose crimes and general behavior define a villainous man, and Bigger, of whom we hear reports only of kindness and nobility. Why does the author contrast these two characters so vividly? Do you think his point is overstated? How do these extremes of character serve the story?

7) Everything we know of Jake and Jolene’s relationship indicates that his careless and sometimes neglectful attitude toward her and her wishes is habitual. Why does she put up with it?

8) Boss Chief says of his late wife, “I might even’ve been a different man with her at my side.” What kind of man might he have been? What sort of regrets, if any, do you think this statement implies?

9) Do you think Jake would have made a good boss chief? Did he have what it would take to reform the prison?

10) Discuss the different ways sex is discussed in the book—from the adolescent excitement of Jake and Sissy, to the matter-of-fact romps of Boss Chief and his secretary, to the “magic” between Bigger and Letitia, to the violence between Clyde and Sissy, and even the “unspeakable acts” between Alley and his son. What role does sex play in the telling of the story? How important is it in defining relationships in the book?

11) In reliving her daughter’s drowning and its aftermath, Sissy wishes she had taken time to tell Letitia, “You have been a comfort to me.” Do you think this would have been as important to Letitia as Sissy seems to think it would? What does it say about Sissy that this is the primary regret she expresses in her recollections?

12) Do you think that Clyde Tisdale is inherently a bad man? What factors might motivate his behavior toward Sissy?

13) Most of the adults in the book seem to have chosen their paths, but the children—Jeana, Jakey, young Robert Tisdale—still have their lives before them. What do you think each will make of the events of the story? How might the events of the book alter their fates, if at all?

14) Discuss Calvin McGales’ motivation in leading the Klan. What drives him? Does his role and behavior in the KKK bear any similarity to the way he carries out his bootlegging business? Why do you think he was chosen as a leader above other Klansmen? What qualities of his make him a desirable candidate for the Klan’s membership and mission?

15) Although Clyde Tisdale defines the Klan as the greatest danger, his foil to the Klan’s rule is a “civic trinity” of himself, Sheriff Dodd, and Dr. Jenks. Is this ruling class any better for Ruleton? Do you think Clyde honestly thinks it is? Does he even consider the welfare of Ruleton? Does anyone?

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