Sweet Hope

Book excerpt: Sweet Hope is a novel about the friendship between two families, one Black and one Italian, living and working together on a Mississippi Delta cotton plantation 1901-1906. Italians were illegally imported to the South under false pretenses and held in a contract labor system designed to put and keep them in debt while the few remaining African American sharecroppers taught the Italians to work cotton, speak English, and survive. A vicious manager/ overseer, an absentee plantation owner, a rape, an interracial "Romeo and Juliet" love affair, a murder, and hints of a Federal investigation complicate the characters' lives as they learn bitter truths about race and friendship in America. The novel was inspired by the childhood experiences of Bush's grandmother and her family who were unwitting participants in the "Italian Colony Experiment."