10-year-old John Wayne Lundy swings a pine knot instinctively at his tyrannical stepfather and knocks him into the flooding Edisto River, where he washes limply into the forks of a fallen tree. His young mind conjures up images of the electric chair, where he believed all manslayers ended up. John flees through the swamps of the South Carolina lowcountry, is befriended by a Negro moonshiner's family, and eventually makes his way to the Mississippi Delta. There, through a series of misunderstandings, he is mistaken for the son of a schoolteacher who had borne an atavist by her part-Negro husband. This provides the backdrop for a story of love amid the racial violence of the Civil Rights era. Through this story, Gene Owens traces the evolution of Southern racial attitudes during the '40s and '50s.