Winner of the Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction (2007)

There are good people and bad on both sides of the tracks that divide Laureate from ‘Colored Town’. Our instruction in that hard truth comes as we follow two African American teens, Cilla Handsom and Joe Billy King, as they endure the backlash resulting from the integration of their segregated school with the all-white school run by Lafayette County’s all-white school board. The issue of the education of Laureate’s children will expose hatreds on both sides of the color divide. Cilla will emerge from her ordeal carrying scars and grace to become a widely traveled classical musician. Joe Billy will be found hanging from the bars of his cell in a Florida penitentiary. Their moving, intertwined dramas put courage, cowardice, loyalty and betrayal side by side in an eloquent, evocative narrative where the demons and angels of a time and place are portrayed in black and white.