Delta Song

About the Book

Delta Song, a three-part novel, is set above Vicksburg in the Mississippi Delta on the river. The action takes place with two plantations, Riverside, owned by Abraham Fair, and Green Rivers, owned by Abraham's sister, Vergie Anderson, and in a settlement along the river, informally presided over by Fred Anderson, Vergie's son. Sarah Kingsley, a farm woman, and her family are connected with both plantations. The novel is broken into a series of interconnected novellas, by using page breaks marked by dashes to make it hang together, while reminding readers that it is a kind of symphony, the song of the Delta, of various stories told by Magdalene (Maggie), as she recalled her coming of age in the Delta in light of Fred's death on the eve of the Civil Rights Movement, a time when Maggie, Fred, Father William, and a small group of youngsters virtually carry on their own reformation. The violent and tragic aftermath remind them of their own humanity and teach them their own self-identity. The river setting provides an opportunity for the romantic mysticism and pagan sensuality which runs through the novel. the novel is framed around the opening scene of Maggie's returning to Vicksburg for Fred's funeral, and the closing scene of her recognician of how the river freed him (and implicitly her and Father William). The material is a series of memoirs recalling who Fred was in Maggie's life, and leading to her final flash of recognician. Read this way, the novel becomes a kind of Bildungsroman, in which a young girl grows to womanhood, and then exile, and views her formative experiences from the sad, but liberating, standpoint of her exile. The series of vignettes are echoed to read like music, the song of the Delta.

About the Author

Born in the Faulknerian north-east corner of Mississippi, Margaret vail grew up in the Delta. She attended the Mississippi State University for Women and received a doctoral degree from Tulane University, after which she taught humanities for many years at Xavier University in New Orleans.