In southeast Texas’s Nacagdoches County, Texas Ranger Darren Matthews has problems big and small. As a Black Texas Ranger he is self-motivated to uphold the law of the land and in so doing demonstrate to African Americans that law enforcement can be a force for good. But he may also face an indictment for actions leading to a false conviction of a leader of the Aryan Brotherhood. In despair over decisions he has made, and swimming in alcohol, he turns in his badge and gun.
Torn between upholding the law and standing up for justice, a drunken Matthews is surprised when his estranged mother, who gave him up at birth and who also suffered from raging alcoholism, appears, quite sober, with the story of a missing Black teenage girl. Sera was the lone Black student in an all white sorority. Mom, who has been sober for a couple of years works as a cleaner in the sorority at Stephen F. Austin University, and begs her son to investigate, saying all of Sera’s things have been taken from her room and tossed in a dumpster.
Taking life one day at a time without drink, Matthews, still enraged by his mother’s motley treatment of him over his entire life, cannot resist being a policeman, even though he is no longer one. He investigates beginning with Sera’s dad. Sera’s dad is a Trump supporter, telling anyone who will listen that when Obamacare was passed he could not afford it and his daughter Sera’s case of Sickle Cell went untreated while he and his family became homeless. He has a job now at a meat packing plant, a house, and healthcare for his family. And when he went to a Trump rally, he was treated as a man, not as an African American looking for a handout.
The action takes place during the first Trump administration. The book was published in 2024 so it was written as a history, but its prescience is frightening, and its study of how to be a Black man today in America is provocative.
