Summarizer

=Chapter 1 (by W. Terpstra) = Cassie and her brothers, Stacey, Christopher-John, and Little Man, are walking to school on the first day of the school year, dressed in their Sunday best. T.J. joins them, and tells them about how a man named Berry was nearly burned to death by white men the previous night. T.J. also tells how he avoided trouble by blaming it on his little brother, Claude. For this, the Logan children grow angry with him. A school bus filled with taunting white children speeds by, showering the children with red dust as it passes. Jeremy, a white boy who is often beaten for walking to school with and associating with the Logans, soon joins them. But as a group of white children including his sister runs past, he has to leave them, and head towards the Jefferson Davis County School, the white school, where the Mississippi state flag, with its confederate emblem, flies above the American flag.

The Logan children soon arrive at Great Faith Elementary and Secondary School. Cassie, a fourth grader, is not eager to please her teacher, Miss Crocker. She is assigned a seat in the first row. She and the other students are surprised to learn that this year they will have books. However, the books are very old and dirty; they are books no longer needed at the white school. This infuriates Little Man and Cassie, and they are both whipped for trying to refuse the books. After school, Cassie runs to tell the trouble to her Mama, who is a teacher in the seventh grade. But Miss Crocker is already there. Eavesdropping, Cassie hears her Mama agree with Miss Crocker that she should have punished her children for disobeying their teacher. At the same time, she takes white paper and glues it over the inside cover of the children's books, hiding the table that showed that the books used to be used by white students and were now issued to "nigras."