Book Description

In antebellum Natchez, Mississippi, cousins Sawyer Dundee and Solomon Witcher come into manhood. Both cousins, back from college in the North, attend a party at Clifton, a grand mansion owned by an older couple, the Surgets, and befriend many of the elite Natchez social circle. Sawyer remains in Natchez to run the family sawmill and homestead. Solomon, admonished when he was young by Grandma Dundee that he was special and now realizing his personal luck, charm, and persuasiveness, strikes out on his own to seek legendary buried treasure of Natchez Trace outlaw preachers and Natchez Indians. He journeys to Louisiana to the Troyville Indian Mounds at Jonesville and the French settlements south of the Red River in Avoyelles Parish. He finds success near Marksville, where he hears of a redheaded female healer who had visited the area. Traveling to New Orleans to invest in the slave trade and pursue his luck at playing poker, Solomon encounters the redheaded Egypt and two of her followers--Ann, a Cajun woman who met her at a cemetery, and Zethro, a slave Egypt freed at the Theophilus Freeman Slave Market from a cruel master. Solomon, after learning of the red string legend, gris-gris bags, and a street preacher named Xenophanes, joins in a plot of vengeance stemming from the 1853 Yellow Fever epidemic in New Orleans with Egypt and her devotees that ends with voodoo and Celtic justice imposed upon a New Orleans businessman in the Girod Street Cemetery.