The narrative begins with Denver Moore explaining why he, as a black man, didn’t want to risk talking to Miss Debbie (Deborah Hall) when he first met her at the shelter in Fort Worth, Texas, in the late 1990s. While living in Louisiana in the 1950s as a teenager, he changed a flat tire for a white woman on a country road, but before he could finish, three white boys rode up on horses. They accused him of “bothering” her, and when the woman said nothing in his defense, Denver was lassoed around the neck and dragged down the road. As opposed to this being an anomaly, Denver says—much as with the case of Emmitt Till, a few years later—“That’s just how things was in Louisiana in those days” (3).

Denver spent almost thirty years working as a sharecropper in Louisiana and living in a shack he didn’t own, along with two pairs of overalls bought on credit, a hog, and an outhouse. One afternoon in the mid-seventies, after hearing there were better opportunities in places like New York, Denver, and Detroit, he hopped a freight train that took him to Fort Worth.