The Deep, Down, & Dirty South

Buy the Book - Excerpt

There is a deep, down, south that is full of genteel people. People of manners and good breeding who come from a long linage of ancestral blood traced by bloodline, not bullets. There is the sense of propriety, of old oaks draped in moss, of white lattice on the veranda, of days gone by and an earthly elegance that cannot be found and duplicated in any part of this earth. This book isn't about them.

These stories come from The Deep, Down, & Dirty South. A place carved more out of poverty and sweat, backbone and the raw gumption of determination. Where folks would be likelier to drink moonshine in the moonlight than Mimosas under the Magnolias.

It's about people who picked cotton and sharecropped, worked in peanut mills, lumber mills, and any other work their hands could find to ward off death and starvation. And when I try to trace much of my heritage it comes back to these people.

Tough as nails, terrible in their mightiness - downright frightful survivors of a hard life and a legacy of nothing to show for it but raw skin and bent backs. They are made up of back-woods beauty queens and biscuit makers, preachers and gamblers, planters and purveyors of hidden truths. These stories stream from these people. This is from where I came. This is who I am.

Praise for River Jordan

"I always knew that River Jordan was a wellspring of stories; I just never knew they'd be so breathtakingly beautiful. This is a magical novel."
— Lynne Hinton, author of Friendship Cake and The Arms of God

"...in the Southern tradition of William Faulkner, she can knit together sentences that can take your breath."
— Florida Today

"She [River] makes you care about the people she writes about, even the ones you might not like, but more than that, she makes you see them. her literary spice rack has everything you need to put together a good book, and this was fun to taste."
— Rick Bragg, author of All Over but the Shoutin' and Ava's Man

"River Jordan writes so beautifully, with such faith and grace and surety, it is entirely possible to believe that she is transcribing for an angel."
—Joshilyn Jackson, author of Gods in Alabama