My Bully Protector

In a village in the 1980s, a family whose son cannot father a child can arrange for another man to get his wife pregnant, and the wife is not consulted about it. Ella Baker's in-laws have been beating her for years, and the man they pick is a villager who is mentally disabled. They put a drug in her food. She gets out of the house while she can still walk and hides in a melon shed at the edge of the fields. The shed belongs to Ray Cole, who has a name in the village as its bully, and the neighbours who hear where she spent the night assume the rest of it. He hands over everything he owns to her and handles her as though she might break. With him standing between her and the family she was married into, Ella stops going along with them and gets herself out.