The book, Good Old Boy, was written in 1971 and takes place in the small Mississippi town of Yazoo City. The book contains experiences of the author’s childhood in his small town.
The story began by telling many of the legends of Yazoo City. One of these legends involved a woman who lived by the Yazoo River. She supposedly lured fishermen to her house to kill and bury them in the woods never to be found again. The sheriff eventually found out about her and chased her through the woods into quicksand where she sank and died.
Before she was completely under the sand she vowed to return twenty years later to have revenge on the town on May 25, 1904. Her body was retrieved from the quicksand and buried with a giant chain around her grave. On May 25, 1904, the whole town was engulfed in flames.
Everything was destroyed in this blaze. The next day, some citizens went to her grave, and to their horror, the chain had been broken. Another legend was one about Casey Jones, a famous train engineer who was killed while saving his passengers’ lives. The last legend mentioned was about a race of giant Indians who supposedly lived on the land that Yazoo City was built on.
Next, the book told about the childhood life of the author, Willie Morris. Willie, his dog Skip, and friends had many exciting adventures together in that small town. They ranged from school day pranks to having saved the town from a band of thieves.
They usually spent a lot of their time in Bubba’s Model A Ford. Bubba was about eleven or twelve and had a car. They mainly stuck with the guys, but Rivers Applewhite, a girlfriend, went with them on many of their adventures. They took trips up into the hills some weekends to look for old Civil War battlefields.
One year a huge crime wave swept through Yazoo City. There were things stolen that no one could imagine anyone stealing. The thieves stole radios, jewelry, money, and tombstones including the bodies in the graves. The strange thing was that they left no evidence. The whole gang, including Willie, Bubba Barrier, Skip, Billy Rhodes, Big Boy Wilkinson, Muttonhead Shepherd, Ralph Atkinson, and Henjie Henick, started wondering where the thieves could hide with all the thing they had stolen.
They all came up with the same place: The Clark Mansion. The Clark Mansion was an old mansion a little way out of town that was said to have secret passages all under it. Billy decided that they needed to go see, but no one else wanted to go. Billy went alone the next day. Everyone noticed that he was not at school or at home so they headed to the only place he could have gone.
When they got to the mansion, they went to the house and saw seven eight and a half foot tall Indians dancing around someone. They went around the house and found a secret staircase leading to the attic where they fell through the rotten floor down to the level with the Indians. They looked where the Indians had been dancing and saw Rivers Applewhite tied in a chair.
From a secret door in the floor, up popped Billy and Spit McGee, a backwoods friend of theirs. Spit shot the giant Indians with his homemade pellet gun and pellets. The pellets knocked the Indians out for about three hours.
During that time the sheriff and his posse came and chained up the Indians. They found all the stolen property in the tunnels underneath the house. The town held a big celebration and gave the boys all kinds of free passes and gifts. They also gave Spit the $500 reward money for the thieves.
