Milk and Cornbread: A Dark Appalachian Novel of Kentucky During the Great Depression

Every day at four o'clock, Elsie Whitaker takes a tin cup of milk and crumbled cornbread down to the springhouse.

She is seven years old.

Casey County, Kentucky, 1940. Mae Whitaker is a widow trying to hold a failing tobacco farm with cream tickets, egg money, and $53.20 in a tin box hidden in her closet. The bank man is coming. Her seven-year-old daughter Elsie is her only help.

Then Elsie finds something under the big sycamore root at the head of the hollow. Something old. Something that liv...