She is pregnant, tells James, and the justice lawyer flees at once. Meanwhile, back in Jackson, Marigold, the good sister, has fallen for James Scott, a handsome young black lawyer from New York, working with the Freedom Summer voter registration project. Seeing a way to escape, Violet agrees, but In Birmingham, Alabama, she steals Dewey’s wallet and takes off, landing in Chillicothe, Georgia, where she has a cousin. Violet is such an attractive woman that, despite the ferocious racism of that time and place, Dewey Leonard, the white son of the owner of a local feed and supply store, has fallen in love with her, wants to run away to the north and marry her. Taking the law into her own hands, she shoots him. As the novel opens, she has been raped by a local white boy, Huxley Broadus, and has exacted her own revenge. Violet is the wild one, a drinker and partier. Named after flowers, the three sisters were their mother’s “bouquet.” Marigold is, to all appearances, the sensible one. Violet and her sister, Marigold, carry on. Her mother and father have both recently died and her sister Rose died only a few years earlier under circumstances we are not told about for a long time, although we are told that Violet blames herself. Her life is at a spectacularly low point. The protagonist, Violet Richards, 22, is a young black woman in Jackson, Mississippi. These are the “given,” what Henry James would call the done, that which we must accept if we are to go forward, but they are a lot to lift. The events that initiate the action of this novel happen in the first few pages.

That killing lurks in the background of the action for the entire novel, motivating some of the action but never really the center of the black characters’ concerns.

“Anywhere You Run” opens with the killing of the three civil rights workers in June of 1964 in Neshoba County, Mississippi.

Anywhere You Run by Wanda M. Morris