Berry, who is burned so badly that he is not recognizable and can no longer speak.
Stacey confesses to Mama, who punishes the four children for going to the store by taking them to see Mr. Morrison catches him and brings him home. He follows TJ to the Wallace's store, where he has been forbidden to go, and punches him. Stacey takes the blame when he is caught with TJ's cheat-notes during a test. Later, TJ tells the Logan kids that these men tarred and feathered a black man, Sam Tatum, for accusing Jim Lee Barnett, who owns the Mercantile in the neighboring town of Strawberry, of cheating him. Cassie sees cars approach the house in the middle of the night and then turn around. Later, the children hear that the "night men" are out. After school, they watch from the forest as the bus drives into the ditch, breaking its axle, flooding its engine, and leaving the white students without a bus for two weeks. (The black school cannot afford a bus because the county does not give it enough money.) One day, after being forced off the road into a muddy ditch, Stacey leads his siblings in digging a trench across the road at lunchtime to make it look like the road has washed out. In October, the children must walk to school in the rain and mud and are splashed by the vindictive driver of the white school's bus. Morrison, who got in a fight with some white men and lost his job on the railroad. Papa returns unexpectedly from the railroad with a very big, strong man named Mr. Mama, who is a seventh-grade teacher, pastes paper over the inside covers of her students' books to hide this information. At school, Cassie and Little Man get in trouble with the teacher, Miss Crocker, by protesting that their used textbooks list the condition "very poor" next to their race. He goes to Jefferson Davis County School while the Logans attend Great Faith Elementary. A white boy, Jeremy Simms, joins them for part of the walk. On the way to school, TJ Avery and his younger brother, Claude, tell the Logans that the Berry family were burned by the white Wallace brothers. Granger, whose family owned the land during slavery times, wants to buy it back and constantly threatens to coerce them into selling it to him.
The family owns four hundred acres of land, half of which is mortgaged, and Papa must work half the year on the railroad far away to pay for it. It is October, 1933, and they are the children of an African-American couple living in rural Mississippi. Nine-year-old Cassie Logan heads to the first day of school with her brothers, twelve-year-old Stacey, seven-year-old Christopher-John, and six-year-old Little Man.
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