Cotton [Paperback]

Lee Cotton is a black boy born white-skinned in segre­gated Eureka, Mississippi, in 1950. Over the course of Lee’s first twenty years, he will fall in love with the daughter of a local Klansman, get kicked senseless and left for dead on a freight train headed north, end up in St. Louis as a white man, and be drafted into the psych-ops corps in Nevada. There, a drunken accident will separate Lee from another part of his identity and change his fate yet again. Before he returns to Mississippi, he will experience up close and personal the women’s liberation movement and the dawn of the Lesbian Nation. 
 
Lee Cotton’s voice—equal parts Delta Blues and Motown—takes us on an exhilarating freedom ride through America’s preoccupation with identity politics. His funny, forgiving charm ultimately embodies a serious message: The freaks and oddities of this world may well be divine.

PRAISE FORCOTTON
Huck Finn meets Myra Breckinridge? Candide meets Yossarian? . . . [Lee Cotton] is, paradoxically, a complete original. --TheWashington Post Book World

[Wilson's ] sense of humor and snappy pacing make this an appealing tale of a bygone America where truly anything can happen. --Allison Lynn,People

Eureka, Mississippi

When I finally slither out mewling, I've already given Mama hard labor, because she's been cussing and screaming seventeen hours. Then there's a calm until she sees me. Then she starts howling worse. And even though I come by the customary channel, and she feels me struggling out for sure, and we're tied by an umbilical, still she swears I'm not her child and she's not my mother, and what in God's name is going to become of us? On account of my crazy, scary looks, because I just don't present to the eye like a black baby should.

Word spreads round the homestead. Folks gather in huddles, whispering about the straló,