Ernest J. Gaines

An affectionate and funny story set in the "black quarter" of a Southern sugar cane plantation in the 1940's and told by a child named Eddie, who watches his mother leave his father over his preoccupation with his car, which his father ultimately burns to the ground on the advice of a voodoo woman to get his wife back.

A compelling novel of a man brought to reckon with his buried past...
In St. Adrienne, a small black community in Louisiana, Reverend Phillip Martin—a respected minister and civil rights leader—comes face to face with the sins of his youth in the person of Robert X, a young, unkempt stranger who arrives in town for a mysterious "meeting" with the Reverend.  
In the confrontation between the two, the young man's secret burden...

From the author of A Gathering of Old Men and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman comes a deep and compassionate novel. When Grant Wiggins, a college-educated man returns to 1940s Louisiana, he visits and forms an unlikely bond with Jefferson, a young Black man convicted of murder and sentenced to death, for a crime he didn't commit. Together they come to understand the heroism of resisting. Best Books for Young Teen Readers.

The story of the life an African American woman from Louisiana, from the time of her childhood as a slave in the pre-Civil War South to 1962, when she witnesses the birth of the civil rights movement at the age of one hundred and ten.