Four tenant families, some black and some white, lived on the farm owned by author John Keith's family as a child. Although no one who grew up on the farm except for him was active in the civil rights movement, in Canebrake Beach he imagines what would happen to members of black and white families as they progress from the Jim Crow era and beyond. The other short stories in the book explore friendships, relationships, and conflicts of white and black people in the South at various intervals over a span of seventy years.