The Ballad of Little River

A veteran journalist's exploration of a church-burning in south Alabama becomes a richly rewarding evocation of the Deep South--its land, its people, and its sweat--popping summers. More than an anatomy of a church arson, The Ballad of Little River is a poignant but hard-hitting biography of one of the poorest areas in the United States--where deer outnumber people. A cauldron of unresolved racial and familial conflict, of heat, boredom, gossip, and grudges, Little River, Alabama, gained notoriety in 1997 as the site of the U.S. government's first conviction under a new hate-crimes law intended to stop a rash of fires set at black churches around the country. When journalist Paul Hemphill, son of an Alabama truck driver and veteran writer on the blue-collar South, moved into the area, he discovered a world that time had virtually forgotten--an obscure, isolated community in the swampy woodlands far from the mainstream of American life, a forlorn cluster of poverty and ignorance and dead-end jobs. He met a stew of heroes and villains right out of fiction--Peanut Ferguson, Doll Boone, Hoss Mack, Joe Dees, Murray January, a Klansman named Brother Phil, and his stripper wife known as Wild Child--all swirling in a maelstrom of history and heat. Originally published in cloth by Free Press, The Ballad of Little River is Hemphill's gripping look at the southern backwoods, a chilling cautionary tale filled with both kindness and cruelty, told in the steady voice of a master storyteller and one who knows the human heart.