Jim Cole

Never Cry Again Jim Cole

More than 8 decades prior to this present day, a young, selfish and corrupt single mother banishes her only child-a 10-year-old boy-from their rural southern Arkansas home. The boy, Drew, already concerned for his safety since recently witnessing a KKK school burning, knows that if he is alone the Klan will seek retribution against him. He must run. The young white boy, lost and alone, is the subject of a depression-era fiction story that will touch the human soul. When Drew embarks on his solitary and dangerous adventure of extreme poverty and starvation, he realizes that his childhood is over at age 10. He knows that the only people he can trust are members of the Black community that have surrounded him all his life, yet they cannot help since it is they who are the Klan's primary and deadly focus. Drew's desperate and dangerous journey takes him away from Arkansas into northern Louisiana where he finds temporary shelter with a gambler and bootlegger. The young boy becomes an involuntary witness to robbery and murder and once again must run, knowing that those responsible will want to keep him from telling what he knows. The coming-of-age story of a young man traveling through the racially turbulent American South provides the reader a heartfelt and ultimately joyful story of strength and true grit as Drew fights toward responsible and compassionate manhood. Compared by critics to both Huckleberry Finn and Stand By Me, Never Cry Again paints a compelling mosaic of life in the 1930s rural American South.