When I think of the farm, I think of mud.There was no defeating it. The Mud coated everything. I dreamed in brown.
City-bred Laura, having turned thirty, gives up all hope of ever getting married, until forty-year-old, college-educated Henry McAllan enters her life. After a brief courtship they marry and start building a life together. They are blessed with two children and live a comfortable, middle-class city life, but Henry dreams of land and the family farm that was lost by his father.
As the Second World War shudders to an end, Henry surprises Laura with the announcement that he has purchased a farm in rural Mississippi, to which they are moving along with Henry's detestable father. Laura finds the Delta foreign and frightening, but is willing to make the most of raising her children there.
In the midst of the family's struggles, two sons return from the war to work the land. Jamie McAllan, Laura's younger brother-in-law, is everything her husband is not - charming, handsome, and haunted by his memories of combat. Ronsel Jackson, eldest son of the black sharecroppers who live on the McAllan farm, has come home with the shine of a war hero. But despite his bravery in defence of his country, he is still considered less than a man in the Deep South of 1946. It is the unlikely friendship of these brothers-in-arms that drives this powerful novel to its inexorable conclusion.
The men and women of each family relate their versions of events as they see them, and we are drawn into their lives as they become players in a tragedy on the grandest scale.
