This searing and inspiring prequel to Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry is the story of Cassie Logan's grandfather. Paul-Edward is the son of a white father and a half-black, half-Indian mother. His father raises him almost as if he were white, but when it counts, he's treated as a black man with racist spite and hatred. He cannot fit into either the black world or the white world. The one thing that Paul-Edward loves is the land, and he spends the rest of his life trying to own land of his own. He takes on a variety of jobs, and is brutally cheated and mistreated by his white employers, but he eventually succeeds, at great personal and financial cost, in owning his own patch of land.