The story of two larger-than-life personalities from one humble corner of the Missippi Delta: the senator, James O. Eastland, a fabulously wealthy cotton planter and the sharecropper, Fannie Lou Hamer, who grew up desperately poor a few miles from Eastland's plantation. Asch charts the epic struggle for black equality in the 20th century by telling the story of the two deeply intertwined life histories of the staunch segregationist senator and his sharecropper nemesis.