Julius Lester tackles the brutal subject of mob lynching in a slender novel that reads like a one-act play. Set in the Deep South in 1946, the story is told from the perspective of a white teenage boy. Fourteen-year-old Ansel is beginning to notice things—his feelings for the pastor’s daughter Mary Susan, for example, and how his friendship with Willie, a Black teen who works at his father’s store, is frowned upon. Ansel’s understanding of himself and his community is radically transformed after Mary Susan is raped and murdered by the cruel, arrogant son of the wealthiest family in town. Ansel stumbled onto the crime in its final moments, but before he can make a statement the finger is pointed at Willie’s father, a gentle disabled man. Knowing that his friend’s father is innocent, Ansel frantically looks for justice, only to be blockaded by his father: “ 'I don’t like this anymore than you do. Don’t you think I don’t know it’s wrong? … You’re going to come with me to get the rope, and we’re going to stay around and watch whatever happens, whether we want to or not.’ ” Willie’s father is hung from a tree in the town’s center by an angry mob. In the aftermath, Ansel makes his escape from a father and town he can no longer bear with the help of his mother, a browbeaten woman determined to free her son from a future in that place. In the story’s epilogue, it is clear Ansel never truly escapes from the horror he witnessed as a young man. An author’s note, appendix, and bibliography on the topic of lynching conclude this powerful novel. (Age 13 and older)

There are times when a tree can no longer withstand the pain inflicted on it, and the wind will take pity on that tree and topple it over in a mighty storm. All the other trees who witnessed the evil look down upon the fallen tree with envy. They pray for the day when a wind will end their suffering.

I pray for the day when God will end mine.

In a time and place without moral conscience, fourteen-year-old Ansel knows what is right and what is true.

But it is dangerous to choose honesty, and so he chooses silence.

Now an innocent man is dead, and Ansel feels the burden of his decision. He must also bear the pain of losing a friend, his family, and the love of a lifetime.

Coretta Scott King Award winner and Newbery Honoree Julius Lester delivers a haunting and poignant novel about what happens when one group of people takes away the humanity of another.