This is one I just happened upon at the library - I didn't know anything at all about the events chronicled by journalist Nate Blakeslee from 1999 to 2003, so I took a chance, and I'm very glad I did. Tulia is a small town in the Texas Panhandle, and in 1999, a joint County-State-Federal drug enforcement task force raided it and arrested more than 40 of its citizens on charges of cocaine sales. The vast majority of those charged were black and impoverished, and the arrests netted fully one fifth of the town's total black residents.Just another sad story about the intersection of race and poverty with drug use, one might think. But this bust was unusual in several respects. First, all of the arrests were for delivery of powder cocaine, instead of the much more common crack. Second, all of the arrests depended on one sole piece of evidence: the testimony of Tom Coleman, the Swisher County undercover officer who made, according to his own testimony, more than 100 buys from more than 40 different people over an 18-month period.
A caveat first - I have not actually read this book - I'm afraid my native masculinity militates against my perusing books of such overwhelming... girliness. My beloved sister, the Contessa of Haut-Eigenwald, however, has read this book, and apparently quite liked it. She appreciated its strong characterization of three women living the deep south of the early 1960s: Skeeter, a white college student trying to avoid immediate marriage, Abileen, a black housemaid mourning her own son, while raising those of her employers, and Missy, Abileen's free-spirited best friend.
