The word appears 2 times.
This book is about a family of white share croppers. They are ignorant, poor, selfish, sinful; about as low as you can get on the humanity scale, but they are still better than black folk. At one point one of the characters, Dude, kills a black man by running into his wagon with a car. He just leaves the body to the side of the road and thinks nothing of it. Here is Dude's description of the aftermath of the accident.
"It was that nigger," Dude said. "If he hadn't been asleep on the wagon it wouldn't have happened at all. He was plumb asleep til it woke him up and threw him out in the ditch."
"He didn't get hurt much, did he?" Jeeter asked.
"I don't know about that," Dude said. "When we drove off again, he was still lying in the ditch. The wagon turned over on him and mashed him. His eyes was wide open all the time, but I couldn't make him say nothing. He looked like he was dead."
"Niggers will get killed. Looks like there ain't no way to stop it."
--- and that's the sum total of their concern.