This Petty Pace

Often times the history of the Miss. Delta is lost in the effort to make more exciting and glamorize its past. The travail of the ordinary working classes, the plebeians and lower elements, who exerted most of the physical toil and sweat and anguish of clearing this land, draining its forbidding mosquito swamps, saving it from the raging river, then bringing some aspect of civilization to it, are painted over completely or glossed with an imperfect brush and sometimes left out entirely. These tales are about some of these people. How their ranks are encumbered by long generations of consanguinity, isolation, fear and superstition and how their disposition, character and religion are molded by this. They evoke a closeness and affinity to place and an almost palpable perception of some of their simple pleasures and fears, their cravings and needs and their response to the daily burden and elation of living. THIS PETTY PACE is the tale of the author’s return to an aunts farm he frequented as a youth and while there was himself visited by a bizarre, spectral force and image from the distant past. ONE WITH NINEVEH is told by a nearly blind uncle, who sees his town as it existed eighty five years ago and recalls in bright detail a religious revival there thirty years later. THE FOREST OF THE NIGHT is an account of a refugee, expatriated from the hill country. Ambitious and beguilingly cunning, he brought with him the dark, inbred character of his people’s religious and racial prejudices and anti-Semitism, already flourishing in the deep, fertile earth of the Delta.