Chicago-born Armstrong Todd is fifteen, black, and not used to the segregated ways of the Deep South when his mother sends him to spend the summer with relatives in her native rural Mississippi. For speaking a few innocuous words in French to a white woman, Armstrong pays the ultimate price when her husband, brother-in-law, and father-in-law decide to teach him a lesson. As each man and woman turns toward or away from the calling of their hearts, this precariously balanced world and its determined people-white and black-are changed, then and forever, by the horror of poverty, the legacy of justice, and the singular gift of love's power to heal.