The Deadening
The Mississippi Delta. Before the Blues Had a Name.
In 1895, five hundred Italian immigrants boarded a ship in Naples with a papal blessing and a contract they couldn't read. The contract was a trap. The land they were headed to - ten thousand acres of Mississippi bottomland - had already broken convicts and freed men and every scheme Austin Corbin had tried before them.Antonio Piccolo knew the contract was a trap before he signed it. His uncle had told him: every system has a window. The people who build rooms are never as smart as they think.
He was right. He just didn't know what the window would cost.
The Deadening is a novel of the Mississippi Delta in the decades before the blues had a name - a story of systems and the people who built them, bent them, and were broken by them. Italian immigrants and freed Black communities. Chinese merchants and Delta planters. Charley Patton playing a frolic house on the far side of the Sunflower River, bending notes no one had bent that way before. And in the corner, a boy with a battered guitar across his knees, listening - learning something he couldn't yet play, that didn't yet have a name.
It is a story about America: how fortunes get built on other people's labor, how beauty grows out of brutality, and how the people history forgets are often the ones who made history possible.
Includes a note on the real people and real events behind the fiction.
For readers of James McBride, Ron Rash, and Edward P. Jones.
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