Book Overview

Echoes of the fatal shots fired in Dallas on November 22, 1963 reverberate in this collection of seven stories set in Louisiana during the civil rights era. For a varied cast of characters--the artist in the title story who tells the tale of his sojourn at LSU during Kennedy's "brief and shining moment" through a retrospective of his paintings; the schoolteacher soon to be married grieving with her mother over the shattered dream of a charmed and happy First Family's life; the disabled man witnessing the killing of Oswald on the TV screen with a growing premonition of the coming darkness in the world; the lawyer, son of a Southern-born mother and a Yankee father, reliving the loss of his beloved wife in mourning the nation's loss; the African-American wife of a preacher praying to the ghost of her dead mother for solace; the woman who, in moving her family away, feels the place reach out and pull them back; the young couple transplanted from the Midwest entranced by the fairy-tale beauty and amusements of their new life who become caught up in the social upheaval of the times--the violent death of our youngest President is a crucible for the dawning of historical consciousness in the wake of the nation's loss of innocence. An Afterword traces the genesis and the thirty-three-year journey to the publication of this book of stories.