Luke Chandler, a seven-year-old farm boy lives in the cotton fields with his family in a little house that's never been painted. The Chandlers farm eighty rented acres. When the cotton is ready they hire a truckload of Mexicans and a family from the Ozarks to help harvest it. As the weeks picking cotton pass Luke sees and hears things no seven-year-old should, and finds himself keeping secrets that not only threaten the crop but will change the lives...

Looks at the history of the Mississippi River Valley in the nineteenth century and the economy that developed there, powered by steam engines and slave labor.

"For more than 130 years, from the early nineteenth century until the mid-twentieth, cotton was the leading export crop of the United States. And the connection between cotton and the African-American experience became central to the history of the republic. America's most serious social tragedy, slavery and its legacy, spread only where cotton could be grown. Both before and after the Civil War, and well into the twentieth century, blacks were relegated...