Griffin's Way — Frank Yerby

Shortly after Paris Griffin, young, handsome and the master of what had been a Mississippi great plantation before he had ridden off to civil war, returned home to the uneasy peace, he was felled by a personal tragedy so shattering that it cost him his memory and left him a helpless, bedridden invalid. Only after harrowing months when everything else had failed was Candace Trevor, the nurse his brother hired in desperation, able to lead him back out of his utter blackness, only to find that in that tortuous process the two of them had fallen in love. Yet each was married to another, bound helplessly by promises neither was able, in honor, to break.

The Klan had no sense of right and wrong only a sense of superior and inferor... and they intended it to keep it that way. As the Grand Dragon of the Ku KluxKlan, Di Cadwallader is determined that in post-war Mississippi there will be no equality between the races even if he must murder women, children and liberal whites. Even Laurie Griffin, the wife of another man, who Cadwallader claims to love, is not safe from his murderous campaign in defense of white supremacy. Mississippi's climate of evil is so compelling that the black man, sent to educate the children of ex-slaves, embezzles the funds he is given and amasses a personal fortune intending to flee North. This is a story about what actually happened in the South after the Civil War.