"My roots ran deep into the red earth; the land felt as much a part of me as my limbs, my heart. I hated it with a fury. I loved it with an all-consuming passion. This is the great paradox of the South. It's a Savage place, a complicated place, and yet it still burrows into you, like the fangs of one of the water moccasins I used to hunt as a young girl down the Chickasawhay River behind our farm. There's a venom in the soil. But there's an alluring beauty to it as well"

Teny grew up in Waynesboro, Mississippi, deep in the Jim Crow south. Her parents married when her mom was only fifteen, her dad from a very poor background. Yet, he became the richest man in the county, built a big house for his wife and four daughters. Their marriage beyond dysfunctional by the time of Tenys birth, she the youngest by ten years. Her mother sucuumbing more and more to alcohol to drown her unhappiness with her husband and his constant adulteries. Screaming, yelling their fighting the background to her days. Their black housekeeper Virgie providing the only consistency and unconditional love in which she could depend.

Sixties and race relations were changing, but no where more slowly than in Mississippi. The ku Klux Klan were still active and a threat to those blacks and whites that didn't toe the line. Times that for the longest time Tent couldn't understand. The dysfunction in her family, ever present, led her to forge her own path. Surprisingly there was also occassins of love, times when her parents surprised her with their understanding. She was also gay, something she could not acknowledge nor tell her parents until her college years. Her parents, their relationship with her were complicated, and at the end the people they were surprised her the most.

A fascinating look at Southern mores, a changing racial world, and a family that despite their lack of money problems, had more than its fair share of unhappiness. ( )