african americans fiction

A young Negro boy learns the pain of humiliation and anger when his father is given an unjust jail sentence for stealing a ham from a white man. Learning to read and to discover that things do not die but become part of other things brings the youngster new hope.

Tired of living with an abusive father and an unloving mother, who supervise a rural prison farm, thirteen-year-old Pickle and the released black convict he has befriended travel all the way across America in search of adventure, freedom, and a life free of discrimination.