Mini Review: Deer Creek Drive

Deer Creek Drive: A Reckoning of Memory and Murder in the Mississippi Delta, by Beverly Lowry.

            A troubled mother-daughter relationship powers this true crime book by novelist and short-story writer Beverly Lowry. Ruth Dickins is convicted of killing her mother in 1948 in the Mississippi cotton town of Leland. Jurors don’t buy her claim that the stabbing — more than 100 cuts from a pair of garden pruners — was the work of a Black man. But Ruth only spends six years in prison thanks a vigorous campaign by her husband. Lowry grew up in the Mississippi Delta around the time of the killing. She did not know Ruth, but weaves the experiences of her less-well-to-do family into the narrative. The book becomes a forceful commentary on race and privilege in the South.

Highly recommended.