Summary

The novel opens from the perspective of a black man named Denver.

Denver revealed he did not often speak to white women until he met a woman named Miss Debbie. The last time he spoke to a white woman was in the 1950s while he worked on the cotton plantation in Red River Parish in Louisiana. Denver was 16. He stopped to help a white woman fix her broken down car when a few white boys drove by, beat him up, tied a noose around his neck and made a horse drag him.

Denver worked the fields for nearly 30 years like a slave even though slavery had been outlawed for 100 years. He grew up poor, uneducated, and in perpetual debt bondage to white cotton plantation owners Denver collectively referred to as “The Man.” Denver “worked them fields for nearly thirty years, like...