The Rock Cried Out

It is the beginning of 1971 and Alan McLaurin, at twenty-two a young idealist and aspiring poet, dreaming of solitude and longing for the wintry smell of cedar and pine he knew growing up in rural Mississippi, has left Boston behind to return to what remains of his family's ancestral homeplace in Chickasaw Ridge. He finds the small closed community still haunted by memories of 1964, when civil rights activists fought for integration while the Ku Klux Klan roamed the back roads. It was...
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It is the beginning of 1971 and Alan McLaurin, at twenty-two a young idealist and aspiring poet, dreaming of solitude and longing for the wintry smell of cedar and pine he knew growing up in rural Mississippi, has left Boston behind to return to what remains of his family's ancestral homeplace in Chickasaw Ridge. He finds the small closed community still haunted by memories of 1964, when civil rights activists fought for integration while the Ku Klux Klan roamed the back roads. It was during that summer that a local black church was destroyed by arsonists and that Alan's beloved cousin Phoebe was killed in a mysterious car crash along with the wife of his black friend Sam Daniels. As he begins to uncover the history behind that senseless tragedy, and as the people involved reveal their unsuspected role in it, Alan must confront his region's violent history and his own buried demons.