Now, in her first novel, repercussions are felt for decades in a dozen lives after a racist beating turns to cold-blooded murder in a small 1950s mississippi town. Chicago-born amrstrong tood is fifteen, black, and unuse...Now, in her first novel, repercussions are felt for decades in a dozen lives after a racist beating turns to cold-blooded murder in a small 1950s mississippi town. Chicago-born amrstrong tood is fifteen, black, and unused to the ways of the segregated deep south, when his mother sends him to spend the summer with relatives in rural mississippi.