The book is set in Georgia in the late 1950s, when Jim Crow laws enforced segregation in the American South,[1][2] and is written from the perspective of a black woman.
While the two eldest boys in the family perform physical labor each day, Rozelle forces several of her daughters to go to "the farmhouse" far from home where they receive money in return for sexual acts.
Phillips' main inspiration was the consideration of the things that children would have undergone living in the South before child protection laws existed.
Tangy Mae's main interest is in educating herself, while all of her elder siblings no longer attend school so that they can work to bring income to the household.
In a short chapter, Tangy Mae and Martha Jean are teaching Edna and Laura to jump rope when Rozelle comes out onto the porch holding Judy and throws her into the gully behind the house.
When the police and doctor arrive to the scene, Martha Jean refuses to release Judy's body to be examined to determine whether she is alive or dead.
The blood is not her own and she tells Miss Pearl in the morning that Junior Fess crawled through the window of the room at the farmhouse and killed the man that she was sleeping with, the same that had beaten Tangy Mae.
Furthermore, Rozelle's relegation of Martha Jean to household duties and the care of her younger siblings portrays the conventional attitude that people with hearing impediments were only capable of close-to-home physical labor.