In this story of injustice and redemption set in rural Louisiana during the late 1940s, Grant Wiggins, a backwoods schoolmaster, is asked visit a young black prisoner on death row. Jefferson, the prisoner, was falsely accused and convicted of murder and is sentenced to hang, and Wiggins's job, once he realizes the impossibility of overturning the verdict, is to prepare the boy for death. Although, as a nonbeliever, Wiggins at first finds himself in competition with the minister for the boy's attention, he eventually comes to see that the cultivation of any instinct of love--human or religious--is the essence of salvation, both for Jefferson and himself. Ernest J. Gaines's morally wrenching novel has become a classic of American literature.