Bayou Jesus

If Jesus came to us today, who would he be? Louisiana in the first half of the twentieth century convulses between old and new, antebellum and modern. Zassy, a sharecropper coming to adulthood finds what she thinks is love with a traveling Bible salesman, but ends up with real love from a son she is sure is a blessing from God. Samson, master of a failing plantation, returns from war with dreams of a resurrected South, only to find his wife sinking into alcoholism from his abuse. The daughter born to them grows up to rebel against everything he stands for. And at the heart of the story, Frank Potter, Zassy's son, struggles through the web of greed and lust to find his way to the God who looms above the world like a judging father. The lines of all these lives weave together into the threads of love and service that form the tapestry of religion and asks us to find the Christ in all of us. Entrancing, altruistic and shocking, the Jesus of Miller's bayou is a gritty meditation on the changing times, and will haunt readers' memories long after others fade.