Through the eyes and heart of twelve-year-old Billy, the son of the overseer of a large sugar plantation, the story is told as he witnesses the brutal forms of segregation and oppression in the early years after WWII. This fictionalized memoir is a wrenchingly honest and compelling story. Author Bill Hunt creates a likeable Billy, and a lovable black friend Papa. Billy finds himself accepted by both sides of a clearly delineated social and racial divide, but with his innocent view of life, he rarely questions the goodness of people because he believes that people are inherently good. Billy is confident in his beliefs, until a rare snowstorm blankets the area, and for the first time he realizes the great disparity in his life in the Big House compared to the deprivation in the lives of his friends who live in the plantation Quarters. From that time of stark awareness of the inequities of the society in which he lives, the dirt road comes to symbolize the meanness of way of life essentially unchanged for over a hundred years. Anxious but sad, I knew that my life had reached its time to cross the sharp, dangerous, and decisive edges of that chasm: and I must cross itcross it entirelybecause there was no island, no place where I could be, or for anyone else who had lived as I had, in both a black, and a white world. The author presents a moving account of one boys young life and how his perceptions of a childhood he loved and once considered ideal become suddenly turbulent and then increasingly painful, a realization that unfolds as memorably and graphically as the storys carefully honed narrative itself. At the heart of this coming-of-age novel lies the sense that a world Billy onceconsidered safe is in fact a dark and dangerous way of life, powered by the persistent evils of racial inequality and suppression. This tale is written in a manner at once matter of fact, subtly funny, emotive, and poignant, and finally moving. Only such a work can make you believe you lived there, in a time and place lost in history, and knew the characters so wondrously described, with a masterful stroke of dialect as existed in the plantation country of Louisiana in 1946. It is a story about family, about relationships, and its message is timeless and universal. NOTE: Part of the author proceeds from the sale of this book will be donated to The Boys and Girls Clubs of America, to establish a club in the authors hometown Bunkie, in Central Louisiana.