The 1926 forty-foot cruiser was in need of restoration yet out of all the vessels for sale at the New Orleans antique boat auction, it was the Willie Mae that caught Mobile resident Jim Williams’s eye.

Perhaps it’s fate. Perhaps it’s chance. Or perhaps it’s the influence of a story that has waited decades to be told.

While admiring his new purchase, Jim meets Otis Brown, who claims to have once captained the Willie Mae. Inviting Otis onto the boat to discuss the cruiser’s workings, Jim finds himself captivated as his new friend recalls the boat’s namesake—a lovely young girl named Willie Mae Dawson.

Born into poverty in the Alabama Black Belt, Willie Mae is a humble cotton field worker when she meets Foster K. Siler, a young lawyer and a man who was to become one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the nation. Their introduction begins a tumultuous love affair that lasts a decade, enduring one of the most devastating wars in human history and ending in a trial that rocks first a city and then a nation.

An unpredictable tale of love and betrayal, Willie Mae transports readers back to what many think of as a simpler time, only to reveal that human relationships are eternally complex.

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