Deer Creek Drive: A Reckoning of Memory and Murder in the Mississippi Delta

In this thought-provoking memoir, Lowry (Who Killed These Girls? The Unsolved Murders That Rocked a Texas Town) weaves her story of growing up in mid-20th-century Mississippi with the story of a white socialite’s murder and its aftermath. In 1948, Idella Thompson, the widow of a prominent planter, was stabbed 150 times in her house in Leland, deep in the Mississippi Delta. The victim’s 42-year-old daughter, Ruth Dickins, was home at the time and claimed a Black man was the killer. Given the lack of evidence pointing to an unknown intruder, Dickins was eventually left as the only suspect. She was brought to trial, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison in 1949. However, after Dickins’s well-off white friends and family applied political pressure and embarked on a letter-writing campaign, Dickins was released having spent six years in prison and given a full pardon. Focusing less on the crime itself and more on white privilege in that time and place, Lowry elegantly details Southern daily life and the struggles for equality that eventually led to desegregation. This timely reminder of the injustices of America’s past deserves a wide readership. Agent: Anne-Lise Spitzer, Philip G. Spitzer Literary. (Aug.)