Sugar

McFadden's debut novel opens in 1940 in Bigelow, a small, mostly Black town in Arkansas, with the rape and murder of Jude Taylor, a young girl whose death leaves her mother Pearl withdrawn into church and grief. Fifteen years later Sugar Lacey moves into the house next door to Pearl — a house left to her by the mother who abandoned her as a baby. Sugar was raised in Short Junction by the Lacey sisters, who ran the town's whorehouse, and left at fifteen, the very day Jude was killed, for years of degradation in St. Louis and Detroit that flashbacks lay bare. Bigelow's women rise against the prostitute in their midst, above all once their husbands begin visiting her, but Pearl, struck by Sugar's uncanny resemblance to Jude, insists on friendship over sweet-potato pie and church Sundays. Each woman gives the other something withheld for years — Pearl a measure of loosening and joy, Sugar a reason to stay — even as buried connections between their families tighten toward violence and revelation. A Southern novel of sin, judgement and unlikely grace, Sugar introduced Sugar Lacey, whom McFadden returned to in the sequel This Bitter Earth.

Author: Bernice L. McFadden · Original publisher: Dutton (New York), 2000