Thirteen-year-old Rose Lee Carter is walking on a dirt road to the home of her elderly neighbor, Miss Addie, to deliver eggs in rural Stillwater, Mississippi. When she hears the distinctive sound of Ricky Turner’s truck accelerating, she jumps out of the way, falling and breaking the eggs. Rose, furious, picks up a rock and throws it at the truck. Ricky reverses and confronts her, using racial epithets and spitting tobacco juice onto her legs. Rose recognizes 14-year-old Jimmy Robinson, son of her family’s employer and landlord, inside the cab. Ricky hurls a glass bottle filled with tobacco spit in her direction, threatening to shoot Rose next time. Rose walks home, recalling that when they were young, Jimmy and her brother, Fred Lee, were once close friends.

The new car belonging to Rose’s mother’s husband, Mr. Pete, is parked outside her grandparents’ house when Rose arrives home. Her mother’s stepchildren, Li’ Man and Sugar, announce that they are moving to Chicago. Their mother, Anna, abandoned Rose and Fred Lee in their grandparents’ care when Mr. Pete, newly widowed, proposed to her. Claiming her own seven- and five-year-old son and daughter were “big now. […] Two babies is enough for me to care for” (13), their mother began calling her children “Sister” and “Brother” and raising Mr.