AprilB

In the summer of 1976, recently widowed and childless, Ora Lee Beckworth hires a homeless old black man to mow her lawn. The neighborhood children call him the Pee-can Man; their mothers call them inside whenever he appears. When the police chief's son is found stabbed to death near his camp, the man Ora knows as Eddie is arrested and charged with murder. Twenty-five years later, Ora sets out to tell the truth about the Pecan Man.

Cotton County, Georgia, 1930: In a house full of secrets, two babies - one light-skinned, the other dark - are born to Elma Jesup, a white sharecropper's daughter. Accused of her rape, field hand Genus Jackson is lynched and dragged behind a truck down the Twelve-Mile Straight, the road to the nearby town. In the aftermath, the farm's inhabitants are forced to contend with their complicity in a series of events that left a man dead and a family irrevocably fractured.

From white trash mill village girl to Senior Cinderella. In Alabama Blue, Toni K. Pacini shares her tumultuous journey. A girl raised up like an invasive weed in an Alabama cotton mill village where illiteracy, bigotry, religious fanaticism, and abuse were as commonplace as fried chicken on Sunday. From pillar to post, and coast to coast, she sought a dauntingly illusive refuge.