Current Work In Progress
The Year They Buried King Cotton (working title)
Eighty-year-old Eddie Jo Johnson thought she’d buried the past until the past came knocking.
Eddie Jo Johnson has managed to avoid celebrating her birthday for sixty-five years. Her beloved cousin, Maddie, died the day Eddie Jo turned sixteen. But Eddie Jo’s son, Jackson, and daughter-in-law, Rachel, are determined to make her eightieth birthday a day to remember. Little do any of them realize just how memorable it will be.
Fifteen-year-old Eddie Jo has never felt more uncertain of the future than in the summer of 1933. Amid bank closures and farm failures, the citizens of Marcoot, Alabama are eager to accept the lifeline provided by President Roosevelt’s Agricultural Adjustment Act. Everyone, that is, except Eddie Jo’s father, Jack Odom. Labeled a holdout by neighbors and family alike, Jack struggles with the morality of plowing under a viable crop in exchange for a government check. Life on the farm is all Eddie Jo has ever known. What will happen to their way of life if her father doesn’t sign?
Maddie has always been Eddie Jo’s confidante and source of strength until she sets her sights on Gray Brown. As the sweltering days of summer pass, Maddie spends more time with Gray and less with Eddie Jo. Gray’s good looks and charm are only skin deep though, and Eddie Jo worries that Maddie’s infatuation with him will lead to nothing but trouble.
When the girls find the fugitive responsible for a rash of food thefts hiding on the property, they must decide whether to turn him in or show compassion. Eddie Jo’s actions set in motion a chain of events that will alter the course of her life, and Maddie’s, forever.
Set against the backdrop of the Great Depression, The Year They Buried King Cotton follows Eddie Jo as she comes face to face with the choices that have defined her and discovers it’s never too late to begin again.
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