Jethro, who is nine years old when the first April blooms, must run the farm in southern Illinois almost alone during the Civil War. Dangers on the home front prove as exciting as those in battle.
The ordinary interactions and everyday routines of the Watsons, an African American family living in Flint, Michigan, are drastically changed after they go to visit Grandma in Alabama in the summer of 1963.
In Mississippi in 1955, a sixteen-year-old finds himself at odds with his grandfather over issues surrounding the kidnapping and murder of a fourteen-year-old African-American from Chicago.