Baby Moses

It’s the 1950s. The American South. And Moses is returning home. After years away, he’s visiting Miss Clio, the woman who found him as a baby in a basket on a creek mudbank. Harve and Enos are a couple of hardscrabble losers making time at the local Grain & Feed. They need nineteen dollars to pay back the boys at the V.F.W. so they can get back in Friday night’s card game. They hatch a plan-grab a shotgun and rob a Black church during Sunday service. What they do know is that the plan is foolproof and that absolutely nothing can go wrong. What they don’t know is Moses-or what he has in his duffel.

This story is about seven church robberies, the Chicken Shack, pipe tobacco, a double-barrel shotgun, a library book, the Dicks cousins, a flat rock by a creek, three bus tickets, a granary, a bag of MoonPies, an Italian piano factory, the Colonel, four dollars in pennies, a cellar, dusty jackweed, Charlie’s Roadside Diner, a swamp shanty, Sergeant Isaac Catfish Dudley, hot peppers, a poker game, the Klan, and one pipe wrench.

But mostly it’s about a man named Moses trying to make things right.