Shiva Naipaul’s newly reissued book of reportage, “Journey to Nowhere,” from 1980, is far less interested in the trope of the charismatic cult leader than in the mechanisms of belief.

Fannie Lou Hamer was born in 1917, the 20th child of Lou Ella and James Lee Townsend, sharecroppers east of the Mississippi Delta. She first joined her family in the cotton fields at the age of six.