Passing Through Perfect

Benjamin Church comes home to Grinder's Corner, Alabama, from the Air Force an ace mechanic. He had wanted to fly; the colour of his skin decided otherwise. He works his father Otis's small farm instead, and at a dance he meets Delia, a parson's daughter whose father wants better for her than a sharecropper.

They marry anyway, and for a while the hard work is bearable because Delia makes it so. Then one drunk man on one road takes her, and Benjamin is left to raise their son alone in a state where the law is not for him.

The third Wyattsville novel, and the one that reaches furthest back: a quiet, angry portrait of the segregated South in the 1940s and 50s, and of a man who has to decide where to take his child.