In the winter of 1946, Henry McAllen moves his city-bred wife, Laura, from their comfortable home in Memphis, Tennessee to a remote cotton farm in the Mississippi Delta—a place she finds both foreign and frightening.

While Henry works the land he loves, Laura struggles to raise their two young daughters in a crude shack with no indoor plumbing or electricity, under the eye of her hateful, racist father-in-law.

Jamie McAllen is everything his older brother Henry is not: charming, handsome, and sensitive to Laura’s plight, but also haunted by his memories of combat.

Ronsel Jackson, eldest son of the black tenant farmers who live on the McAllen farm, comes home from fighting the Nazis with the shine of a war hero, only to face far more personal—and dangerous—battles against the ingrained bigotry of his own countrymen.

There, he is caught up in the turmoil of the Civil Rights struggle and forced to navigate a complex tangle of race, history and politics in his search for self-realization.