“Gary shook his head in disbelief. ‘What about you, Sylvia?’ Gary asked. ‘Are you going to stay in the Amen Corner with the old folks, or open your eyes and look at the future?’”

Gary, a young man often at odds with his parents and the older generation, believes that religion is an ineffective method for combatting racism. When he comes home to find his baby sister has been bitten by a dog trained to attack Black people, he is livid. He views religion as a crutch and an excuse, and he wants action. Gary is tired of the lack of change in Little Rock, and he wants his sister Sylvia to embrace more contemporary ways of fighting racism, whatever those ways might be.

“All the colored folks I knew were angry and scared. If a teenager from Chicago could get lynched, what chance did we have here in Arkansas?”

Sylvia refers to the 1955 lynching death of 15-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi. Emmett was visiting from Chicago when he was accused of flirting with a white woman in a grocery store. The woman’s father and brother tracked him down, beat him, shot him, and threw his body in the river. Sylvia is aware that this incident happened only two years earlier and resulted in the death of a teenager from the North. She wonders how her community will survive school integration in a Southern city when this is how white people treat a perceived racial transgressor. Throughout the novel, Sylvia introduces significant people and events from history that help to define this story as a work of realistic and historical fiction.