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PROLOGUE — MARCH 4, 1873, 11:30 P.M.
I can see it now, the Ring & Co. store, blazing like a funeral pyre in the swampy desolation of the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta. Through the enormous flames lapping the walls and clawing across the roof, I see the outline of the two-and-a-half story building as though I were standing there, right in front of it, that Tuesday night, March 4, 1873. The heat sears my face and the smoke stings my eyes, though behind me the air is cool and filled with drizzle. It rolls down the back of my neck and chills me to the bone. The monstrous roar, the crackling and popping, spitting and smashing pierces my ears and throbs in my head and I wince from the pain.
For 30 years I have been standing here, shivering in the steamy blackness of Rolling Fork Landing, mesmerized. The broad cypress roof collapses into the second story. The second floor crumbles into the first. The gigantic chimney crashes to the soggy ground with a thud, and a geyser of sparks and ashes and thick smoke billows triumphantly skyward. I have been straining to identify, somewhere within the din, a pitiful tiny scream.
Perhaps the people inside are screaming. Even if there were some witness standing as close as I - and there is no one within fifty yards of the place - the victims' cries could never be heard above the clamor of the inferno. Yet I keep listening for the wail of a man or woman or child. Blinking uncontrollably, I keep peering into the flames to see whether Joe Ring comes rushing out to the safety of the Sunflower River.
For three decades I have been planted here, appalled, and the fire keeps raging, and the huge cypress timbers keep snapping and collapsing, and the bricks of the chimney keep tumbling in thumps that vibrate the ground beneath my feet, and the pillar of smoke and sparks keeps dissipating into the mist, and still I am not satisfied.
I first heard the story of "the Rolling Fork tragedy" - a sketchy and garbled version of it, at any rate - from my grandmother when I was a boy. I had no idea that it would take possession of me. I did not even believe it. All I wanted was a family tree. It was 1963, a summer's day, and Grandma Ring had come on the bus from her home in Buffalo to ours in the suburbs. As she unfolded her cotton fabric on our dining room table, I assumed a chair nearby, a fresh Composition Notebook on my lap, a sharpened pencil in my hand. I was fourteen years old.
With a sweep of her palm, the matriarch flattened the creases and expelled the air bubbles. I think it must have been a floral print, something in yellows and greens, because this is how I remember all of Grandma's dresses. Then as she arranged the odd shapes of tissue on the material, I began self-consciously to pose the questions. Grandma responded willingly, ancestor by ancestor, generation to generation, branch by branch, without looking up from her work. She was pinning the pieces to the
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