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In the Pines: A Lynching, A Lie, A Reckoning Audiobook, by Grace Elizabeth Hale Play Audiobook Sample

In the Pines: A Lynching, A Lie, A Reckoning Audiobook

In the Pines: A Lynching, A Lie, A Reckoning Audiobook, by Grace Elizabeth Hale Play Audiobook Sample
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Read By: Matt Godfrey, Nicole Swanson Publisher: Little, Brown & Company Listen Time: at 1.0x Speed 4.83 hours at 1.5x Speed 3.63 hours at 2.0x Speed Release Date: November 2023 Format: Unabridged Audiobook ISBN: 9781668632406

Quick Stats About this Audiobook

Total Audiobook Chapters:

16

Longest Chapter Length:

64:41 minutes

Shortest Chapter Length:

05 seconds

Average Chapter Length:

26:47 minutes

Audiobooks by this Author:

1

Publisher Description

“Courageous and compelling…essential and critically important.” —Bryan Stevenson

An award-winning scholar of white supremacy tackles her toughest research assignment yet: the unsolved murder of a Black man in rural Mississippi while her grandfather was the local sheriff—a cold case that sheds new light on the hidden legacy of racial terror in America. 


Grace Hale was home from college when she first heard the family legend. In 1947, while her beloved grandfather had been serving as a sheriff in the Piney Woods of south-central Mississippi, he prevented a lynch mob from killing a Black man who was in his jail on suspicion of raping a white woman—only for the suspect to die the next day during an escape attempt. It was a tale straight out of To Kill a Mockingbird, with her grandfather as the tragic hero. This story, however, hid a dark truth.

Years later, as a rising scholar of white supremacy, Hale revisited the story about her grandfather and Versie Johnson, the man who died in his custody. The more she learned about what had happened that day, the less sense she could make of her family's version of events. With the support of a Carnegie fellowship, she immersed herself in the investigation. What she discovered would upend everything she thought she knew about her family, the tragedy, and this haunted strip of the South—because Johnson's death, she found, was actually a lynching. But guilt did not lie with a faceless mob.

A story of obsession, injustice, and the ties that bind, In the Pines casts an unsparing eye over this intimate terrain, driven by a deep desire to set straight the historical record and to understand and subvert white racism, along with its structures, costs, and consequences—and the lies that sustain it. 

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About Grace Elizabeth Hale

Grace Elizabeth Hale is the Commonwealth Professor of American Studies and History at the University of Virginia. An award-winning historian and internationally recognized expert on modern American culture and the regional culture of the US South, she has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the American Scholar, and CNN’s website, and has appeared as an expert on southern history on CNN, C-Span, and PBS. A recent Carnegie Fellow, she is the author of several previous books, including Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940, and lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

About Matt Godfrey

With a voice described as having a vivid, silvery tone with a bright and sunny dynamic, Nicole Swanson’s narration conveys a warmth and charm informed by her Southern roots and experience as the mother of three amazing daughters. Nicole’s strengths lie in her flexible range, ear for accents, and character development skills. Nicole loves escaping into her home studio to entertain her faithful listener, Blackjack the Studio Dog.