"I sat up reading (Death in the Delta) night after night as the book grew in intensity. Thank you for writing this remarkable, difficult story. Staring down the killings, acknowledging their hardness, the edges that made them possible, the airs, oh it’s all there. And then there’s you, standing in the gap, asking the questions, again and again, the hard ones, struggling to be fair. Impossible. And writing this book anyway. Know that your book touched a deep chord. It’s reverberating still. Thank you for the courage you summoned to tell this story.  May it set off hundreds of courageous tellings, white and black. This is the way through, the way back, the story."

 

—China Galland, author of Love Cemetery and Power of the Dark Feminine

 

 

"Molly Walling takes the reader into the heart of a dark human mystery and brings us—and herself—to a moral reckoning. Death in the Delta is part detective story, part family lore, and part history of a time and a place where an American tragedy unfolded in secret. Powerful and captivating from start to finish."

 

—Philip Gerard, author of The Patron Saint of Dreams

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"Set in that shadowy moment between the return of soldiers from World War II and the coming dawn of the civil rights movement, Death in the Delta contributes to the history of a region and an era. Walling finds all that can be known—and then she makes peace with what can’t. If compassion can become a form of craft, and it can, this book achieves that—there’s no sentimentality here, just living language in which the writer forgives, and seeks forgiveness for her family, but permits no forgetting. From the moment she set out to find the remaining members of the Toombs family, Walling became a one-woman truth and reconciliation commission."

 

—Diana Hume George, author of The Lonely Other: A Woman Watching America