Neilson chronicled her work with Robert Clark, the Democratic Party nominee for U.S. Congress in 1982 and 1984, and her own "evolution as a white among blacks, seeking a new Mississippi.
"[3] The book chronicles Neilson's family history[3] and its connection to old Mississippi politics,[4][5] specifically "the emotional trials of a young white woman from an old Delta family who violates deeply-rooted race, caste, class and gender taboos by going to work for a black politician.
"[13] Neilson was criticized by some for "giving the FBI a positive role that in fact it only rarely filled in the deep South during the most difficult years of the 1960s.
"[13] Most reviewers, however, focused on "the death throes of the Jim Crow South" and Neilson's ability to capture "the feel of a culture at a particular time and the ineffable moment a heart changes.
"[14] A month after the book's publication, publisher HarperCollins identified eight separate sentences similar to passages[15] in Barbara Kingsolver's 1988 novel The Bean Trees.