Death in the Delta: Uncovering a Mississippi Family Secret

by Molly Walling

Overview

A search for the truth behind a fateful shoot out and decades-old cover up

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781617036101
Publisher:	University Press of Mississippi
Publication date:	09/07/2012
Series:	Willie Morris Books in Memoir and Biography
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Molly Walling is adjunct writing instructor at University of North Carolina, Asheville. She was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi.

Table of Contents

Primary and Secondary Players ix

Prologue xi

Chapter 1 Out of the Blue 3

Chapter 2 A Secret Will Out 7

Chapter 3 The Scion 13

Chapter 4 My Mother's Version 23

Chapter 5 The New Mississippi 33

Chapter 6 What King Evans Told Me 51

Chapter 7 Big 61

Chapter 8 Undertow 78

Chapter 9 Revelations 97

Chapter 10 Yet Another Version 103

Chapter 11 Silencing of a Community 113

Chapter 12 Obstacles 123

Chapter 13 Breakdown 133

Chapter 14 Digging Deeper 146

Chapter 15 Sis 157

Chapter 16 Dad's Final Days 164

Chapter 17 History 177

Chapter 18 Springtime in Mississippi 194

Chapter 19 Reasonable Doubt 202

Chapter 20 Memory 209

Acknowledgments 217

A Note on Sources 219

Editorial Reviews

"In Death in the Delta, Walling effectively weaves the mystery of the murders with childhood memories of her landed, extended family and erratic alcoholic father, newspaperman Jay Fields.... Driven by her love for him, Walling combed his articles and letters for clues to his troubled psyche, wondering whether guilt about the murders caused his self-destructive behaviors."—Stephanie Harp Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies


"Molly Walling takes the reader into the heart of a dark human mystery and brings us—and herself—to a moral reckoning. Death in the Delta is part detective story, part family lore, and part history of a time and a place where an American tragedy unfolded in secret. Powerful and captivating from start to finish."

-Philip Gerard, author of The Patron Saint of Dreams, winner of the 2012 Independent Publisher Gold Medal for creative nonfiction/essay




"Set in that shadowy moment between the return of soldiers from World War II and the coming dawn of the civil rights movement, Death in the Delta contributes to the history of a region and an era. Walling finds all that can be known—and then she makes peace with what can't. If compassion can become a form of craft, and it can, this book achieves that—there's no sentimentality here, just living language in which the writer forgives, and seeks forgiveness for her family, but permits no forgetting. From the moment she set out to find the remaining members of the Toombs family, Walling became a one-woman truth and reconciliation commission."

-Diana Hume George, author of The Lonely Other: A Woman Watching America and author or editor of ten books of nonfiction, poetry, and literary criticism

From the Publisher