In his third book Mitchell L. H. Douglas delivers a lyric bildungsroman, a hymnal of manhood, eerily guided from page one by Etheridge Knight, who, like Douglas, lived a full life at the cursed cross of Kentucky or Indiana, enslavement or liberation, incarceration or career. What does it mean to make love, grocery shop, make it home, each night, safe? dying in the scarecrow's arms is our needed testament of black life mattering, of a man owning his own, because, by God, he can.–Rebecca Gayle Howell, author of American Purgatory