east texas

"When it comes to law and order, East Texas plays by its own rules--a fact that Darren Mathews, a black Texas Ranger, knows all too well. Deeply ambivalent about growing up black in the lone star state, he was the first in his family to get as far away from Texas as he could. Until duty called him home..."--OCLC.

Contains two novellas set in Haley, Texas in the 1950s, including "Seven Days Working," in which an older man recalls his childhood and the impossible task he was given by his father when he was fourteen; and "Haley, Texas 1959," a story of a preacher who is called in to mediate after the murder of an African-American teenager, not realizing his own son was involved in the killing.

Recently orphaned, Jack Parker witnesses his grandfather's murder and his sister's kidnapping by bank robbers while traveling to his uncle's farm in East Texas and vows revenge.

On Halloween night, a recently divorced seamstress named Chintana attends a fiftieth birthday party set in a foster home that turns out to be for her ex-husband's mistress. A mysterious storyteller arrives to entertain the five orphans there. He keeps them spellbound with his tale of vengeance and his long black box that holds a magical weapon--a sword that cuts but shows no wound until the victim's fiftieth year of life. As midnight approaches, the box is opened, and the partygoers come face to face with the sword's deadly power.

When Harry Crane discovers the mutilated body of a young African-American woman, he unwittingly unleashes a storm of fear, racial animosities, and violence in Depression era East Texas.

A boy remembers his father's stories about life in East Texas during the Great Depression.