At first Cassie Logan and her brothers, a year or so older than
they were in the much briefer, gong of the Trees, (1975) are only
dimly aware of rumors that two men have been killed and one badly
burned by a white mob. Then Mary, their mother, tries to organize a
boycott against the Wallaces, the local storeowners and instigators
of the violence, and Logan land and lives are put on the line.
Cassie's own spirit is demonstrated straight off, on the first day
of the school year, when she refuses to accept a schoolbook labeled
"condition - very poor, race of student - nigra." Like her parents,
Cassie learns that she must pick her shots carefully to survive,
and she takes pains to learn a few blackmail-level secrets from her
special tormentor, Miz Lillian Jean, before giving the older girl a
good thrashing. Tragically though, brother Stacey's friend T.J. who
isn't so careful, starts hanging around with the Wallace boys and
winds up facing a lynch mob after they talk him into helping them
rob a store. Although the Logans, whose ownership of desirable
farmland has made them a target of white persecution, live in a
virtual state of siege, and even after Papa sets fire to his own
cotton to divert the attention of the mob from T.J., the story ends
unmelodramatically not far from where it began - after a string of
hard-fought victories and as many bitter defeats and with the money
for the next tax payment on the land still not in sight. Taylor
trusts to her material and doesn't try to inflate Cassie's role in
these events, and though the strong, clear-headed Logan family is
no doubt an idealization, their characters are drawn with quiet
affection and their actions tempered with a keen sense of human
fallibility. (Kirkus Reviews)
The Mississippi of the 1930s is a hard place for a black child to grow up in and Cassie finds it difficult to understand why the farm means so much to her father. But she begins to reach a painful understanding when she witnesses the hatred and destruction around her and learns when it is important to fight for a principle even if it brings terrible hardships.
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