Ginny Gall

Delvin Walker is just a boy when his mother, accused of killing a white man, flees their home in Chattanooga. Taken in by Cornelius Oliver, proprietor of the town's leading Negro funeral home, he discovers the art of caring for the aggrieved and a rare peace in a hostile world. Yet tragedy visits them nearly daily, and after a series of devastating events?a lynching, a church burning?Delvin fears being accused of murdering a local white boy and leaves town.Haunted by his mother's disappearance, Delvin rides the rails, meets fellow travellers, falls in love, and sees an America sliding into the Great Depression. Before his hopes for life and love can be realized, he and a group of other young men are falsely charged with the rape of two white women and shackled to a system of enslavement masquerading as justice. As he is pushed deeper into the darkness of imprisonment, his resolve to escape burns only more brightly, until, in a last spasm of flight, he is called to choose his fate.