Sixteen-year-old Clifton Carlson, emotionally scarred from having seen his father beaten to death by white police officers ten years earlier, grows up without friends or the support of his mother, who has become an alcoholic, but his life is changed when, desperate for friends, he puts messages in bottles and sends them down New River where they are intercepted by Swamper, an elderly man who lives in a shack on the riverbank.
