In 1940s Mississippi, two teenage boys and an elderly woman combine forces to prevent a miscarriage of justice and clear a black man of a murder charge.

In a highly racialized southern American town, white teenage Chick Mallison doesn't much like that he has been considered a friend to older black Lucas Beauchamp, ever since he met Lucas when Lucas helped him after falling into a creek on Lucas' property. Deep in his heart, Chick does consider him a friend and a good man. Many of the white people in town don't much like Lucas in he not being subservient to white people in general. But when Lucas is charged with shooting white Vinson Gowrie to death in the back, Lucas caught standing over Vinson's body and there having been a recent public altercation between the two, that vitriol against Lucas reaches new heights, Sheriff Hampton needing to add extra security at the jailhouse to protect Lucas with many of the white townsfolk wanting to lynch Lucas. But as Lucas asks Chick to ask his uncle, attorney John Gavin Stevens, to represent him, which Stevens does do, Lucas confides not in Stevens, who like everyone else believes Lucas guilty, but in Chick in telling him of his innocence. While not seeing the shooter and thus not directly pointing the finger at any one person in not wanting to convict someone else without conclusive evidence, Lucas does strongly suspect someone and points Chick in the direction on proving his innocence which would require the dangerous move of digging up Vinson's buried body. Chick, with his black friend Aleck and seventy year old white Miss Eunice Habersham, by his side, they also believing in Lucas' innocence, they go on that dangerous mission with most of the angry white townsfolk against them if they knew what they were doing.—Huggo

Rural Mississippi in the 1940s: Lucas Beauchamp, a local black man with a reputation of not kowtowing to whites, is found standing over the body of a dead white man, holding a pistol that has recently been fired. Quickly arrested for murder and jailed, Beauchamp insists he's innocent and asks the town's most prominent lawyer, Gavin Stevens, to defend him, but Stevens refuses. When a local boy whom Beauchamp has helped in the past and who believes him to be innocent hears talk of a mob taking Beauchamp out of jail and lynching him, he pleads with Stevens to defend Beauchamp at trial and prove his innocence.—[email protected]