Death in the Delta: Uncovering a Mississippi Family Secret (Willie Morris Books in Memoir and Biography)
"InDeath in the Delta, Walling effectively weaves the mystery of the murders with childhood memories of her landed, extended family and erratic alcoholic father, newspaperman Jay Fields.... Driven by her love for him, Walling combed his articles and letters for clues to his troubled psyche, wondering whether guilt about the murders caused his self-destructive behaviors."--Stephanie HarpArkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies"Set in that shadowy moment between the return of soldiers from World War II and the coming dawn of the civil rights movement, Death in the Delta contributes to the history of a region and an era. Walling finds all that can be known--and then she makes peace with what can't. If compassion can become a form of craft, and it can, this book achieves that--there's no sentimentality here, just living language in which the writer forgives, and seeks forgiveness for her family, but permits no forgetting. From the moment she set out to find the remaining members of the Toombs family, Walling became a one-woman truth and reconciliation commission."-Diana Hume George, author ofThe Lonely Other: A Woman Watching Americaand author or editor of ten books of nonfiction, poetry, and literary criticism"Molly Walling takes the reader into the heart of a dark human mystery and brings us--and herself--to a moral reckoning. Death in the Delta is part detective story, part family lore, and part history of a time and a place where an American tragedy unfolded in secret. Powerful and captivating from start to finish."-Philip Gerard, author ofThe Patron Saint of Dreams, winner of the 2012 Independent Publisher Gold Medal for creative nonfiction/essay