THE LEGEND OF BUDDY BUSH

“I remember like it was yesterday when this whole mess that forced Uncle Buddy to leave us started,” says Pattie Mae Sheals of the summer of 1947 when she was 12. Uncle Buddy had come from Harlem five years earlier and his “city ways” got him in trouble in tiny Rich Square, North Carolina. Unjustly accused of making a pass at a white woman, a charge later escalating into rape, Buddy is jailed, taken to court, and nearly murdered by the Klan before escaping. Racism woven into the tapestry of this pastoral setting sets into motion events no one can control, and Pattie Mae dreams of Harlem and a better life in the North. Though the first-person point of view is not always up to handling the dual stories of Pattie Mae and Buddy Bush, it’s an important story and, as Moses says in her author’s note, a labor of love. (Fiction. 12+)