Comment on theme

Many of the stories in this collection are filled with struggles of blacks during the time of slavery or during the civil rights struggle. In The Legend of Pin Oak, Harper McAvoy sells his own brother into slavery. Not only this, but when Harper learns his brother is free, he decides to sell his brother's wife instead. This leads to a man hunt that ends with all of them in the river. In Justice, Alvin Tinsley has taken the fall for a white man once and he is set up to do it again. Alvin manages to escape the law, but he is killed by the KKK in an act of vigilante justice. In The Woman in the Snow, a woman is denied a ride to the hospital because she does not have the money to pay the fare.