Rails Under My Back Author:Jeffery Renard Allen Two young men who are members of a mysteriously complex family. Hatch and Jesus are doubly cousins -- in their parents' generation, two brothers, Lucifer and John Jones, married two sisters, Gracie and Sheila McShan. For Jesus and Hatch, as for all the Joneses and McShans, departure is a constant feature: someone is always leaving town, or the d... more »inner table, or a job, or the family. Yet they somehow pick up and go on: Nothing is more important than the family, even when (or especially when) it seems to be defined by abandonment. The multiple effects of the constant movement are devastating, but one image holding the family together is the railroad -- it carries the Jones men off to war and back again and carries their parents from the South to the North, from living quarters to workplace, from one form of bondage or freedom to another.« less