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With his latest novel, The Bootlegger’s Mistress (MLPR Books), Marc Curtis Little shines a compelling light on the difficult implications of America’s Great Migration, the decades-long exodus of African Americans from the racially oppressive South to the North and West. This is the tale of a fictional family’s 1940s journey under circumstances that require harrowing travel through a twentieth-century version of the underground railroad. It’s also a story about a murder and unresolved justice that lingers eight decades later, both in their hearts and in Anderton, the upstate South Carolina town they left behind.

In the brief prologue that launches the book, 15-year-old Carrie Lula Lacey encounters the sexual advances of her white bootlegger boss, Tommy Joe Butler. While the outcome is not disclosed, the subtext of life in the South for a young woman of color in the early 1940s emerges, with impossible stakes that include loss of life, employment and credibility (as there are no witnesses) — not to mention the fear that if her father finds out, he will fight to defend her honor, an act with its own set of potential consequences. 

A CHANCE TO RECLAIM JUSTICE

Now known as Dicie Caughman, we meet Carrie as a 95-year-old retired journalist living in Newark, NJ. When the police come to arrest her for the murder of Tommy Joe Butler, still unsolved 80 years later, Dicie sees a chance, even a responsibility, to swing justice in her family’s favor and exonerate her name as well. 

Who murdered Tommy Joe Butler on the night she fled town, and can Dicie prove all these years later that her family’s land — land that Mr. Butler claimed as his at the time of his death — really belonged to her family? Little’s questions draw us in right away for their urgency and impossibility. 

With her claim that “I’ve been nobody’s paragon of virtue during my ninety-five years,” Dicie makes it clear that her success in life as a respected journalist means little until she gets her past straight. (Aptly, a James Baldwin quote prefaces the book and establishes its theme: “To accept one’s past … is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it.”)

The story alternates between the riveting, present-day unfolding of Dicie’s arrest, and its eventual outcome, and the rich backstory of her youth. We learn about her childhood before and after her beloved mother and six siblings left her and her father in Anderton, SC; her employment as a bookkeeper for Mr. Butler’s bootlegging operation; her flight from Anderton; her time spent in Jacksonville, FL; and finally her journalism career in Newark that focused largely on “the malaise commonly known as local politics, especially as it applied to Blacks in the early 1960s.” 

VAST REPRESENTATION AND HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Other colorful characters populate the pages as well. Dicie’s maternal grandfather Nate, a Cherokee Indian, earned his money and the family land by helping white people in Anderton make moonshine after the boll weevil destroyed the cotton fields in the early 1920s. Nappy Eddie, her first love in Anderton, helps her escape. 

Her adopted grandson Nathan Absalom Caughman, aka Baby Boy, runs her weekly Newark newspaper for 25 years and shepherds Dicie through her later years with affection and attention. Louis Bilal, another Anderton native, is a Muslim lawyer who plays a big role in the story even at age 93, stating that “In no way, shape or form, does black ever crack, even in extreme age.” The entrance of an unlikely culprit makes for a dramatic ending well worth the wait.

In a context of impeccably researched historical fiction, The Bootlegger’s Mistress offers an inspiring account of a captivating protagonist who not only took on the Great Migration as the impossible challenge it was but was brave enough to seek justice, not just for herself but for her family name as well. 

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About Marc Curtis Little:

Marc Curtis Little is the award-winning author of seven novels and one of America’s better known independently published writers. His historical fiction-inspired novels Faithful Servants: The Collector’s Edition, After Obama, Magnificent Redemption and The Bootlegger’s Mistress have earned five Next Generation Indie Book Awards since 2014, along with two National Indie Excellence Awards (2011 for Angels in the Midst and 2021 for The Bootlegger’s Mistress) and a Winner’s Award from the Independent Press Awards for The Bootlegger’s Mistress in 2021.

Genre: Fiction
Anne Eliot Feldman

After a career as a technical writer for the Library of Congress and other nooks and crannies of our Federal Government, she now happily writes women’s fiction, with her first book about infidelity and the second about chocolate. She considers the two to be related in so many fascinating ways but that will be another book.

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