Baby Moses

Silver Medal Winner, Fiction Southern, 2021 Readers' Favorite Awards

It's the 1950s. The American South. And Moses is returning home. After years away, he's visiting Miss Clio, the woman who found him as a baby in a basket on a creek mudbank.

Harve and Enos are a couple of hardscrabble losers making time at the local Grain & Feed. They need nineteen dollars to pay back the boys at the V.F.W. so they can get back in Friday night's card game. They hatch a plan-grab a shotgun and rob a Black church during Sunday service. What they do know is that the plan is foolproof and that absolutely nothing can go wrong. What they don't know is Moses-or what he has in his duffel.

This story is about seven church robberies, the Chicken Shack, pipe tobacco, a double-barrel shotgun, a library book, the Dicks cousins, a flat rock by a creek, three bus tickets, a granary, a bag of MoonPies, an Italian piano factory, the Colonel, four dollars in pennies, a cellar, dusty jackweed, Charlie's Roadside Diner, a swamp shanty, Sergeant Isaac "Catfish" Dudley, hot peppers, a poker game, the Klan, and one pipe wrench.

But mostly it's about a man named Moses trying to make things right.