Addie Pray Author:Joe David Brown The heroine of Joe David Brown's novel is Miss Addie Pray, an eleven-year-old orphan ("My mama, Miss Essie Mae Loggins, was the wildest girl in Marengo County, Alabama") of monumental shrewdness, who becomes the willing and imaginative confederate of her conman companion Long Boy ("To this day I don't know whether Long Boy was my daddy or not") ... more »in the darkest days of the Depression ("I don't think times were nearly so bad as some people put on...Folks in small places were accustomed to being poor and didn't expect to get rich, like they do now").
Together, they embark on a series of confidence tricks that take them from one end of the South to the other, beginning with the selling of gold-initialed BIbles, moving on to the more ewarding business of hawking pictures of Franklin D. Roosevelt (two dollars with frame), basic and refined wallet stitching, trading in nonexistent cotton crops and taking a risky flier in bootleg whiskey...until they meet Major Carter E. Lee (alias Colonel Culpepper), who not only introduces them to a far more ambitous kind of swindle but sets Addie up for a milion-dollar scheme as the heiress to a great fortune, and almost, almost (but not quite) makes her a respectable young lady.« less