Set in the leafy, agrarian environs of southwestern Arkansas, the novel opens in 1919 with a cow-pasture baseball game between the Sugars Spring men's team and the coloreds of Bethel, an unheard-of event whose outcome disturbs the delicate racial and sexual balance of the community. A year to the day later a cyclone descends, its dark, destructive power visiting black and white alike. Tossing houses, uprooting rosebushes, and mingling lives, the storm becomes analogous to the swirling, evening-time porch stories that give substance to a world as fully realized as Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County or Joyce's Dublin.Spanning over a century of history as rich as the Delta's many-hued soil, and in language vivid with image, humor, idiom, and suggestion, the intertwined stories of the novel have a brilliant dramatic and moral inevitability: the secret rape of a young black woman named Baby and the even more secret murder of her rapist; the abiding rage of former slave Ransom Tramble; the displacement of the Yankee woman Cora Emery McRae; the passions of Sheriff David Ben Sugars; the magical power of the beautiful Delie Turner; the mystical, green-eyed vision of Delie's grandmother, Rebekah Sarah; and the strength, anguish, desire, courage and mystery of Samuel Daniel McElroy, the grandson of slaves. Read Less