The Twelve-Mile Straight

`Eleanor Henderson is in possession of an enormous talent’ Ann Patchett
`A superb novel whose roots can be traced to Harper Lee and Carson McCullers` Oprah Magazine

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.