The tale of Billy Lee Turner, a ten-year-old boy convicted of the murder of a white girl in Mississippi in 1937, illuminates the monstrous face of racism in America with harrowing clarity and power. Narrated in the rich accents of the American South, Billy's story is told amid the picking fields and town streets, the heat, dust and povery of the region in the time of the Depression. Albert French's haunting first novel is a story of racial injustice, as unsentimental as it is heartbreaking.