The Road to Goshen Shoals — Paul W. Valentine

The year: 1970. Deep rural North Carolina. At his dying mother's request, Arlis Morrow, a white newspaper reporter, returns to his small isolated hometown to seek a black man he had known 30 years earlier as a five-year-old playmate and not seen since. With his mother's motivation strangely veiled, Arlis begins seeking clues to the man's whereabouts, encountering subtle resistance from both black and white townspeople - a courtly undertaker, a glad-handing politician, a secretively obsessed Pentecostalist, a sheriff with a shrouded past. Despite their resistance, Arlis gradually unearths truths, mixed with ancient racial ambiguities, that lead him to disturbing discoveries about his family and his old friend and propel him into a final tragic confrontation. "The Road to Goshen Shoals" is more than a tale of quest and confrontation. It is a series of conversations about the powerful and sometimes equivocal impact of the civil rights movement in the South - conversations between and among the region's most important constituents, its ordinary (and sometimes extraordinary) people. A must read for an understanding of the modern South, written by an author with both the subtle grasp of a native and the clarifying strength of a career journalist.