John Washington, a Philadelphia historian, returns to Bedford County, Pennsylvania, to investigate the death of his father Moses, a moonshiner who died under unclear circumstances. His research opens onto an older burial: the thirteen enslaved people who, fleeing north in the 1840s, were killed at Chaneysville rather than be recaptured, and whose unmarked grave the county has kept quiet for generations. The novel won the 1982 PEN/Faulkner Award.
Author: David Bradley · Original publisher: Harper & Row (New York), 1981
