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The Twelve-Mile Straight

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The Twelve-Mile Straight

By: Eleanor Henderson
Narrated by: Allyson Johnson
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About this listen

Genus Jackson was killed in Cotton County, Georgia, on a summer midnight in 1930, when the newborn twins were fast asleep.
They lay head to toe in a cradle meant for one, Winnafred on one side and Wilson on the other.
Only if you looked closely – and people did – could you see that the girl was pink as a piglet, and the boy was brown.

In a house full of secrets, two babies – one light-skinned, the other dark – are born to Elma Jesup, a white sharecropper’s daughter. Accused of her rape, field hand Genus Jackson is lynched and dragged down the Twelve-Mile Straight, the road to the nearby town.

Despite the prying eyes and curious whispers of the townspeople, Elma begins to raise her babies as best as she can, under the roof of her impulsive father, Juke, and with the help of Nan, the young black housekeeper who is as close to Elma as a sister. It soon becomes clear that the ties that bind all of them together are more intricate than any could have imagined. A web of lies begins to collapse around the family, destabilizing their precarious world and forcing all to reckon with the truth.

©2017 Eleanor Henderson (P)2017 Random House Audio Family Life Fiction Historical Fiction

Critic Reviews

"The setup is simple: Two babies - one of them black and one of them white. But the story of how they came to be is one of the deepest and most nuanced explorations of our shared humanity that I've read in a long time. The characters are so vivid that you will feel as though they exist unbound by the pages of the book; the writing is so extraordinary it will make your teeth ache; the story is so compelling that you may gasp out loud - as I did - as the revelations unfold. This is no ordinary novel. It is art of the highest order." (Cristina Henríquez)
"Eleanor Henderson's lyrical evocation of rural Georgia during the Depression is mesmerizing, disturbing, and wonderfully persuasive. The world is brutal even as the landscape is lush and seductive. The Twelve-Mile Straight is unstinting in showing us the everyday savagery of Jim Crow, of poverty, and of family abuse. A riveting, consequential story full of complex secrets and unexpected turns." (Dana Spiotta)
"The Twelve-Mile Straight is anything but - a family drama, a mystery, Southern Gothic, and a searing study of the complexities of race in America. Eleanor Henderson pins on the setting board the intersecting forces of country, community, family and self - each tugging the other, near to the point of tearing. Cotton County and the Twelve Mile Straight within it is a dark place - tortured by its secrets, and it's in Henderson's expert hand and penetrating eye that those secrets are carried into light." (Bill Cheng)

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