Life is difficult for both white and Black farm workers in the South during the Great Depression. Their plight is made even worse by the wealthy landowners who wish to keep them financially dependent. The novel examines several scenarios in which sharecroppers and day laborers remain in a state of servitude even though enslavement has been abolished.

Stacey’s friend Moe Turner comes from a Black sharecropper family. Under such an arrangement, sharecroppers farm their small plots of land and give the landowner a share of their crop. While such an arrangement might not seem terrible, the landowners lend their sharecroppers the money to buy seeds and other necessary items to harvest those crops. At the end of each growing season, a sharecropping family may owe the landlord more than the value of the crop they harvested. For those who are indebted, simply leaving the land isn’t an option because they would be arrested. Moe frequently dreams of finding a way out from under this financial burden, but his friends and family think his aspirations are impossible.

The same state of dependency is played out for day laborers, who don’t even have the security of a plot of land to farm. They are utterly dependent on the rate a landowner is willing to pay for their services a day at a time.