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The Sugar Maple Grove

by John E. Espy

In early twentieth century Van Lear, Kentucky, miners in a conscripted coal town go down to work in the shaft

only to come back up in pieces.

Company-hired detectives and preachers terrorize the workforce, their women and widows, and children into submission with threats of violence and eternal damnation while the Knights subjugate blacks to acts of unspeakable violence.

Slavery is a way of life. Murder is a daily occurrence.

Then one day in the Sugar Maple Grove, Moses Kitchen takes a stand against the members of the Ku Klux Klan sparking a small but enduring revolt against corporate, religious, and racial tyranny that finds its way throughout the generations from the son of a shoe salesman to a feisty, young female lawyer and beyond in this epic Southern Gothic about race, poverty, religion, and barbarism, and those brave enough to dare to see a different society.