A Chicago-born young African-American man pays the ultimate price for speaking a few words in French to a white woman while visiting relatives in Mississippi in the 1950s.
In southern Mississippi, an African-American father kills the two white men who raped and beat his ten-year-old daughter, and a pair of idealistic but inexperienced young lawyers take the case only to find themselves targets of hatred and bigotry in a racist community.
A boy grows up in the segregated South, experiencing both the love and support of his tightly-knit "colored" community, and the bigotry and intolerance of outsiders.
Lawyer Penn Cage goes up against a mix of murder, racial tension, double-crosses, illicit sex...and all of the ensuing violent consequences in the kudzu-strangled, snake- rat- and armadillo-infested hole of the Devil's Punchbowl.