Susan Carol McCarthy

In 1951, the brutal murder of nineteen-year-old Marvin Cully transforms the town of Mayflower, Florida, into a battleground as violence erupts across the state and the NAACP joins in the efforts to uncover the killers.

Lay that Trumpet in Our Hands

In the midst of the Cuban Missle Crisis, Wes and Sarah Avery and their seventeen-year-old daughter, Charlotte, try to keep their lives as normal as possible, but a long-buried secret threatens their family's security.

A Novel

A Place We Knew Well

Here is one of those rare and remarkable debuts that herald the appearance of a major new talent on the literary scene. Inspired by real events, Lay That Trumpet In Our Hands is a wise and luminous story about a northern family, a southern town, and the senseless murder that sparks an extraordinary act of courage. To this day, my family is in disagreement as to precisely when the nightmare began. For me, it was the morning Daddy and Luther discovered Marvin, beaten, shot, and dying, in the Klan’s stomping grounds off Round Lake Road. My brother Ren disagrees. He points to the small cluster of scars that begin just outside his left eye and trail horizontally across his temple to the top of his ear. Ren claims it started when the men in white robes took the unprecedented step of shooting at two white children. Others say it was when Mr. Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP and Mr. Hoover’s FBI came to town. Mother and Daddy shake their heads. In their minds, the real beginning was much earlier....

Susan Carol McCarthy

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