The story of an East Texas tenant farmer and his fight to support his family during the Great depression. The hero, Sam Tucker, contracts to farm sixty-eight acres of San Pedro bottomland, anxious to work the rich soil although he will earn only six bits a day. Sam, his wife Nona, their bumptious children, and one of the most irrepressible grandmothers in modern fiction are characters who absorb the reader in their joys and disappointments.