Cotton Song: A Novel.(book)(Brief article)(Book review)

Cotton Song TOM BAILEY. Crown/Shaye Areheart, $24 (336p) ISBN 1-4000-8332-X

In his haunting second novel (after The Grace That Keeps This World), Bailey presents a vicious history of race relations in his home state. Set in fictionalized Hushpuckashaw County, Miss., in 1944, the novel opens just after the lynching death of Letitia Johnson, a black nanny accused of drowning her young charge. Letitia's 12-year-old daughter, Sally Johnson, becomes a ward of the state, and her case file lands on social worker Baby Allen's desk. Baby takes in Sally, and while hiding the girl from the Klan, she finds an unlikely ally in Jake Lemaster, the onetime college football hero …