Mississippi, the late 1950s. After the death of his father, eleven-year-old Jory Sheppard runs away from an unwanted life in foster care. Trying to make it on his own, he is caught in a violent storm on the Mississippi River, but when he is rescued from the raging waters by an old black man named Moses, it becomes the event that will change his life.

Taken into Moses' family as one of their own, Jory is introduced to a world so familiar and yet so very different from the one he once knew. As he learns and grows under the benevolent care of his new family, he struggles to make sense of the society in which he lives—a society that would spit on a man such as Moses simply because his skin is black, and make every effort to rip Jory from the family he loves.

Quickly entrenched in a struggle that is much bigger than himself, Jory must learn the difference between what feels necessary and what is right, what pity is, and what hate is. If he wants to fight the injustice and uncertainty that surrounds him, he must learn what it really means to stand up for what he believes in.