"The Chaneysville Incident rivals Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon
as the best novel about the black experience in America since Ellison's
Invisible Man." -- Christian Science Monitor
Updated with a new foreword by the author in celebration of its
fortieth anniversary, the classic PEN/Faulkner Award-winning novel about
a man's obsessive quest to uncover the circumstances of his father's
death and his town's murky history.
Legend has it something happened in Chaneysville . . .
John Washington is coming home to Chaneysville. Old Jack Crawley, his
father's closest friend and John's guardian, is dying, and the young man
will care for him in his final days.
For the brilliant and embittered black historian, it is a return that
will plunge him deep into the past, into the dark secrets of this town
and the buried evil of his heritage. Investigating the death of his
father, Moses, a moonshiner with a difficult past, John must come to
terms with his family's proud and tragic history and the terrible truth
of this white rural town close to the Mason Dixon line-- a waystation
for slaves traveling along the Underground Railroad--that he once called
home.
The Chaneysville Incident is the story of John's relationship with his
family, his hometown, and the woman he loves--and the indelible bonds
between past and present, oppression and bondage, history and myth,
faith and guilt, love and acceptance.
