Ghosts on the Oxbow

Eva Clare and Lily are brought together for a reason: to stand up against the very thing that separated them during their 1960s childhood.

Her marriage in ruins, her house ravaged by the 2010 Great Nashville Flood, artist Eva Clare Carlyle-whose paintings depict women under water-returns to her decaying Mississippi Delta hometown. She inherits her ancestral home on an oxbow lake and discovers Black nurse Lily Greene living there, caring for the dying longtime maid of the Carlyles.

Lily divulges a shocking history of the house, changing everything Eva Clare has ever known about herself, including her lineage. Her formidable cousin Gerald Tanner-mayor, banker, deacon, and son of a former KKK member involved in the 1964 murders of three civil rights workers-tries to finagle her out of her inheritance. Eva Clare and Lily team up against Gerald.

Eva Clare has a reckoning with the ghosts of her past: traditions of slavery, segregation, racism aligned with religion-and women held down. Set in the contemporary Delta with flashbacks to Eva Clare's brush with Mississippi's racial history of the 1960s and newly discovered journals of her third-great-grandmother from the 1860s, GHOSTS ON THE OXBOW is an honest and relevant story of renewal and redemption.

KATHY RHODES, sixth-generation Mississippian, was born, raised, and educated in the Delta and held ties to her hometown fifteen miles east of the oxbow she writes about until 2010 when she sold her parents' house. She is author of Remember the Dragonflies: A Memoir of Grief and Healing. Her essays and short stories have appeared in literary journals and anthologies. She currently lives in Nashville where she enjoys hiking with her cocker spaniel and kayaking on the Harpeth River.