
When Jo later discovers a baby in the wreckage, she is certain that she's found her baby brother, Tommy, and vows to protect him.

Inside, she discovers that the tornado has spared no one, including Jo, the McNabbs' dutiful teenage daughter, who has suffered a terrible head wound. Slowly navigating the broken streets of Tupelo, Dovey stops at the house of the despised McNabb family. Bruised and nearly drowned, she makes her way across Tupelo to find her small family-her hardworking husband, Virgil her clever sixteen-year-old granddaughter, Dreama and Promise, Dreama's beautiful light-skinned three-month-old son.

When the tornado hits, Dovey, a local laundress, is flung by the terrifying winds into a nearby lake. on Palm Sunday, April 5, 1936, a massive funnel cloud flashing a giant fireball and roaring like a runaway train careened into the thriving cotton-mill town of Tupelo, Mississippi, killing more than two hundred people-not counting an unknown number of black citizens, one-third of Tupelo's population, who were not included in the official casualty figures.

In the aftermath of a devastating tornado that rips through the town of Tupelo, Mississippi, at the height of the Great Depression, two women worlds apart-one black, one white one a great-grandmother, the other a teenager-fight for their families' survival in this lyrical and powerful novel A few minutes after 9 p.m.
