God Bless the Child

Sue Hathorne has worked with abused children for almost 20 years. A determined Mississippi Baptist woman, she saw a need for a special centre for abused children in the state capital of Jackson. But Sue didn't have any money. Then she met Robert Malone, whose nightly bingo games take in astronomical sums of money and who, under Mississippi law, needed to donate some of his proceeds to charity. Then the real game began - for no sooner did Robert give Sue a check for $6000 than the Attorney General for the state raided Malone's Bingo Depot and indicted him. Ambitious, publicity-hungry, the Attorney General charged - in the face of common sense and local custom of several decades - that bingo was illegal. And so the stakes were raised - for Sue, for Robert, for the thousands of abused children (one of whose stories is told here in detail) - and the outcome would prove crucial for them all. James Colbert has also written the novels, "Profit and Sheen", "No Special Hurry", "Skinny Man" and "All I Have Is Blue".