Logan family (Mildred D. Taylor)

During the Depression, a rural black family deeply attached to the forest on their land tries to save it from being cut down by an unscrupulous white man.

Four black children growing up in rural Mississippi during the Depression experience racial antagonisms and hard times, but learn from their parents the pride and self-respect they need to survive.

In 1941 a black youth, sadistically teased by two white boys in rural Mississippi, severely injures one of them with a tire iron and enlists Cassie's help in trying to flee the state.

In Mississippi in the early 1900s ten-year-old David Logan's family generously shares their well water with both white and black neighbors in an atmosphere of potential racial violence.

Cassie, no longer a feisty eight-year-old, is a young woman now, searching for her place in the world. This journey takes fer from the Logan family home in Toledo to California and Colorado, to law school in Boston, and, ultimately, home to Mississippi to be part of the voter registration drive of the 1960s. She is witness to the no-historic events of the century: the Great Migration north, the relentless racism of postwar America, and the rise of...