The tale of Billy Lee Turner, a ten-year-old boy convicted of the murder of a wh
ite girl in Mississippi in 1937, illuminates the monstrous face of racism in Ame
rica with harrowing clarity and power. Narrated in the rich accents of the Ameri
can South, Billy's story is told amid the picking fields and town streets, the h
eat, 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.
