Chapter 20 Summary

Alice arrives in Heaven and is appalled at the obvious poverty and the run-down condition of all the buildings. Sugar tells her that after the Trail of Tears from North Carolina, the reservation they were given was fairly prosperous, but the naïve Indians were cheated out of their allotments by clever crooks. Sugar married Roscoe Hornbuckle in 1950 and they've lived here ever since. They have several children and Sugar has undergone breast surgery for cancer. She says the boys have given them a lot of trouble, but their daughters are fine. All the children and grandchildren live near them in run-down houses or trailers on the original sixty acres of homestead land that was Roscoe's mother's.

The town is called Heaven because of a favorite water hole on the creek. The residents called it, in Cherokee, "the best place" to swim and...