“There was lots of Emmett Tills, only most of them didn’t make the news. Folks say the bayou in Red River Parish is full to its pea-green brim with the splintery bones of colored folks that white men done fed to the gators for covetin their women, or maybe just lookin cross-eyed.” 

Emmett Till was a fourteen-year-old African-American boy from Chicago who was accused of whistling at a white womanin 1955 while visiting relatives in Mississippi. Four days later, his brutally-murdered body was found in the Tallahatchie River. His widely-publicized, open-casket funeral and the subsequent acquittal of his accused white murderers by an all-white jury was a seminal moment in theemerging Civil Rights Movement. Denver recognizes his race-related experiences were not unique to him but were part of the overall Deep South social order at that time.  

“It would have been perfect if I could have had […] my whole 1963 Haltom High graduating class, lined up parade-style so they could all see how I’d risen above my lower-middle-class upbringing. Looking back, I’m surprised I made it to the airfield that day, since I’d spent the whole ten-mile trip from home admiring myself in the rearview mirror.” 

For much of his life, Ron equates material success with personal fulfillment. However, by referring to his surprise at making it to the airfield because he was looking at himself in the rearview mirror, he forecasts the psychological changes he undergoes over the course of the book. 

“An ought’s an ought, and a figger’s a figger, all for the white man, and none for the nigger.” 

A significant portion of the book examines the Deep South’s post-Civil War plantation system from Denver’s point of view as a sharecropper. While freeing slaves in the nineteenth century was meant to change the white-black social order, very little changed for black rural farmworkers, who still found themselves at the bottom of the economic ladder. As Denver notes throughout, black sharecroppers were always at the mercy of “the Man,” who always had the upper hand.