Milk and Cornbread

Every day at four o'clock, Elsie Whitaker takes a tin cup of milk and crumbled cornbread down to the springhouse.

She is seven years old.

Casey County, Kentucky, 1940. Mae Whitaker is a widow trying to hold a failing tobacco farm with cream tickets, egg money, and $53.20 in a tin box hidden in her closet. The bank man is coming. Her seven-year-old daughter Elsie is her only help.

Then Elsie finds something under the big sycamore root at the head of the hollow. Something old. Something that lives in a hole in the ground.

Her mother Ollie says kill it. Her Granny Vine says the hollow gets lonely if you kill it. Mae makes a different choice - she lets her daughter keep her promise.

What starts as a child's game becomes a ritual that will define Elsie's entire life. Through a copperhead bite, through high school on the Liberty bus, through years of being the strange girl who never stays after the ballgame, through 1948 and 1965 and the day the big sycamore finally falls.

Milk and Cornbread is a haunting work of literary historical fiction for readers of Wendell Berry, Robert Hicks, and Shirley Jackson. It is not a cozy Appalachian story. It is a novel about poverty, motherhood, grief, and the promises children keep that ruin them.

For fans of Appalachian folk horror, Depression-era historical fiction, and unforgettable mother-daughter stories.

She was going to do this for another sixty-nine years.