Content Warning: This text contains racist language, including racial expletives, and violence, as well as depictions of oppression, enslavement, and death by suicide. This study guide quotes and obscures the author’s use of the n-word.

Throughout the novel, the protagonist, Belton Piedmont, sees and experiences racial injustice, even though Black people were freed three decades earlier at the end of the Civil War. Although they are no longer enslaved, can receive educations, and can hold jobs, the systems and structures in place in the US greatly restrict their lives and force them into a form of neo-slavery. They are physically and verbally abused, lynched for small crimes—or no crime at all—and the institutions that are supposed to protect them, such as the law and voting, have abandoned them.

Although the institution of education is technically available to Black people, it still fails greatly in its task of improving their lives. Through Belton’s journey throughout high school and college, the reader sees the flaws of these institutions. Belton is verbally abused and neglected by Mr. Leonard, the man who is supposed to be educating Black children in the newly formed school.