On a Louisiana cane plantation in the late 1970s, the Cajun farmer Beau Boutan is found shot dead in the yard of Mathu, the one Black man on the place who has never bowed to a white man. Candy Marshall, the white co-owner who was half raised by Mathu, summons every old Black man on the plantation to Mathu's yard — each with a twelve-gauge shotgun, each having fired it that day, each to tell Sheriff Mapes the same words: I did it. Eighteen men who have spent seventy years and more swallowing fear discover, in the telling, that the confession is the first free act of their lives. Gaines tells the day through fifteen narrators. The novel was filmed for television in 1987 with Louis Gossett Jr. and Richard Widmark.
Author: Ernest J. Gaines · Original publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York), 1983
