The Pecan Man is a work of Southern fiction by Florida native Cassie Dandridge Selleck. This novel, Selleck's first, has been optioned for film rights by BCDF Pictures, published in audio by Blackstone, and selected by the State of Arkansas as their common reader novel for the year 2016. It has been selected by book clubs across America, taught in high school classrooms in the U.S. and London, and translated in two foreign countries.
In the summer of 1976, recently widowed and childless Ora Lee Beckworth hires a homeless old black man to mow her lawn. The neighborhood children call him the Pee-can Man; their mothers call them inside whenever he appears. When he is arrested for murder, only Ora knows the truth about the man she calls Eddie. But truth is a fickle thing, and a lie is self-perpetuating. Ora and her maid Blanche soon find themselves in a web of lies that send an innocent man to prison for the rest of his life. Twenty-five years later, Ora sets out to tell the truth about the Pecan Man. Listen as she begins her story:
“Blanche worked for me through birth and death, joy and sorrow and Lord knows we had a lot of sorrow in all the time we spent under this roof. Most people figured she was crazy to put up with me all those years, but Blanche and I had an understanding. It was a vow we made back in 1976. Neither of us spoke of it afterwards, but it hung between us like a spider web, fragile and easy to break, but danged hard to get shed of once the threads took hold.”
