Summary

In Chapter 13, Jojo picks up the narration. All through the night Richie's singing under the house keeps Jojo and Kayla up. That morning, Jojo walks into the yard and tells Richie to come down from the tree in which he is now perched. He leads Richie to where Pop is taking down rotted wood from one of the animal pens. He thinks about the way Pop's story of Richie was disjointed and incomplete, "[c]ircling the end like a big black buzzard angles around dead animals...bloating and turning sour in the Mississippi heat" (248).

Jojo asks Pop to tell him the end of Richie's story, and he finally does. Pop tells Jojo that Richie did manage to escape Parchman one day. As he tells the story, Richie chimes in with details he remembers. Richie was forced to flee Parchman by a...