Glad River : A Novel

No one in Claughton County ever understood why Doops Momber refused to be baptized: his people were all good Baptists. And no one in Cummings, Mississippi, knew that Kingston Smylie’s daddy was really his granddaddy and that Kingston wasn’t really white. And at Camp Polk, no one knew anything at all about Fordache Arceneau because he spoke only Cajun. They met in basic training. Green kids who’d always felt themselves to be outsiders, they formed a community of three. They called it the neighborhood. After seeing action together at Guadalcanal, the three friends went back to the lives they’d each known, but they went on meeting regularly, keeping up the neighborhood. Their lives were untroubled, until the day Fordache found himself accused of murder, on trial for his life. And in a small Southern courtroom in the autumn of 1952, the neighborhood-bound by love and based on understanding-faced its ultimate test.