A young African-American 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. William H. Armstrong was best known for his Newbery Medal-winning Sounder, but also authored nearly twenty other books, including a companion novel to Sounder called Sour Land. To write Sounder, he drew from his memories of his first teacher, an old black man who, when lessons were done, would tell him stories from Aesop, the Old Testament, Homer, and his own history.