JIMMIE BARNES is a novel that addresses the issue of race in America. The story takes place in 1988 at the tail end of Ronald Reagan's conservative revolution. Jimmie Barnes is a Mississippi nursing home resident who claims to be well over one hundred years old and a former slave. Jimmie has spent a long lifetime pursuing the return of his father's slave reparations, his forty acres, at times reaching out directly to U.S. presidents. With death nearing, Jimmie resolves to make one more effort; with his nursing home caretaker he takes on Congress, the media, the civil rights establishment and...

Race. A four letter word unlike any other. A live wire, the third rail, the thing your momma told you to be afraid of, the creature that goes bump in the night. This ambitious, hard-hitting anthology takes on race relations in America, past and present. It holds back nothing and no race is spared its fire. These tales - at times poignant, thought-provoking, violent, heart-breaking and humorous - touch the soul of America, a soul wounded from the constant struggle across the racial divide. Barry C. Davis has created a literary mirror and invites you to see yourself. Are you brave enough to do...

Sweets Maybrey is hard. In the language of the streets, this describes an individual who uses fists first, words second, to solve his problems. Twenty-year-old Sweets has just gotten his life straight after two stints in prison and is graduating high school and has won his first pro fight. He has turned his back on doing bad. But life isn't that simple. The straight and narrow, where his father wants him to be, is sometimes a shifting path, one that's real easy to fall off. Sweets' father disappears into the vicious Philly ghetto called the Bottom, trailed by police who say he killed a man....

Philadelphia crime boss Sweets Maybrey has a dead body in his trunk and a weapon underneath his seat. He travels in a stolen car to a destination in the Pocono Mountains called Deer Lake. The destination has meaning to him, less so for his 'passenger.' It is a crossroads, a place where he plans to literally bury the past and begin anew. Thus opens the novel Rose of the Badlands, the third novel in the Sweets Maybrey crime series. While traversing the winding mountain roads Sweets recalls the tumultuous events of the past year: The disastrous fight with a no talent bum named Bobby Turner that...

It is December 1972. Sweets Maybrey climbs the stairs to his office. He is wounded from an assassination attempt, blood slowing leaking out of his neck. He sits at his ancient desk, awaiting the arrival of the person who orchestrated the attempt on his life. He knows that they are on their way to finish the job. While waiting he considers all that has led him to this point. Six months earlier Sweets Maybrey was a rich, powerful twenty-year-old, the new boss of black crime in west Philadelphia. Every week his subordinates pressed envelopes full of pungent cash into his hands, the proceeds from...

The thrilling saga of the Powell family continues in A Strange and Bitter Fruit: The Peacemaker, a follow-up to the bestselling historical novel A Strange and Bitter Fruit. The book opens in 1913, seven years after the tragic conclusion of A Strange and Bitter Fruit. At the heart of The Peacemaker are four males, each consumed by anger and hate given the events portrayed in the previous novel. Robert Powell, son of the wronged Thomas "Tee" Powell, doggedly pursuing the elusive Wendell Pike, the last surviving Klansman of the group responsible for lynching Tee's parents and sisters. Clellon...