Frank Carlson Library

In 1941 a black youth, sadistically teased by two white boys in rural Mississippi, severely injures one of them with a tire iron and enlists Cassie's help in trying to flee the state.

With the land to hold them together, nothing can tear the Logans apart. Why is the land so important to Cassie's family? It takes the events of one turbulent year -- the year of the night riders and the burnings, the year a white girl humiliates Cassie in public simply because she is black -- to show Cassie that having a place of their own is the Logan family's lifeblood. It is the land that gives the Logans their courage and pride, for no matter...

Cassie, no longer a feisty eight-year-old, is a young woman now, searching for her place in the world. This journey takes fer from the Logan family home in Toledo to California and Colorado, to law school in Boston, and, ultimately, home to Mississippi to be part of the voter registration drive of the 1960s. She is witness to the no-historic events of the century: the Great Migration north, the relentless racism of postwar America, and the rise...

In Mississippi in the early 1900s, ten-year-old David Logan's family generously shares their well water with both white and African-American neighbors in an atmosphere of potential racial violence.

Two stories about race relations between blacks and whites in the rural South.