When Luke Washington's estranged father dies suddenly, Luke doesn't even want to go to the funeral, let alone handle the arrangements. But with no one else stepping up, and his grandmother's motto "we do for family" stuck in his head, he makes the trip from Seattle back to the Mississippi Delta and the broken family he left behind. Can Luke bury the past alongside his father, or will the dysfunction of a family ruled by the dead take too great a toll on his heart? "The Burial is a penetrating meditation on race and family as lived in the South. The protagonist's journey back home from the Pacific Northwest to the Mississippi Delta is itself a metaphor for the consequences of the Great Migration. But more than that, The Burial is at once a sad and hopeful story, as stories of race and family in the South have always been and will continue to be for the foreseeable future." -Dr. Thomas Aiello, author of Jim Crow's Last Stand and professor of African-American Studies, Valdosta University