The year is 1860, in the months before the start of the American Civil War. The industrial revolution has brought railroads for fast transportation. Steamships and riverboats sail the seas and ply the nation's waterways. Telegraph provides instant communication. Machines are beginning to replace much dreary human labor... though mostly in the Northern states.

But, thirteen-year-old Skyler Knight returns from a year at a New Orleans school to the tiny Louisiana bayou town of Knight's Crossing -- named after his family -- to find that nothing seems to have changed. This is mostly a relief: there were too many new ideas in New Orleans; too much change happening too fast for his liking. For the first time in his life Skyler had to deal with free black people... blacks who behaved as if they were equal to whites! Skyler, raised on his family's huge plantation of Diligence, was brought up to believe that black people were animals. Intelligent animals, yes, but certainly not human beings.

Yet, Skyler is beginning to wonder about that, to at least subconsciously question the morality of slavery. These are dangerous notions for a boy who will inherit a hundred slaves.

Still, it's good to be home where things never change. Skyler is looking forward to losing his sissified city clothes and reverting to buckskin trousers; to riding his horse and fishing; to hunting with his big Smith rifle and swimming with the slave kids again.

But, something new has come to Knight's Crossing. After getting off the train, Skyler encounters two black boys of around his own age. One is Cartwright, a handsome, muscular boy who was purchased to be a companion for a wealthy plantation-owner's son. The other is an enormously fat boy named Loki -- called Lucky -- who belongs to Seth Franklin, a little-known and reclusive man who owns the small plantation of Content deep in the bayou. There are rumors that Franklin is far too kind to his slaves; that he's allowed them to get fat and lazy. ...And worse, "uppity." Lucky seems to confirm all these rumors. Besides being barely able to waddle, he sasses Skyler to distraction until Skyler wants to whip him, though he's never whipped a slave before.

Skyler's buggy arrives, driven by Jupiter, a wise old slave who has probably had more to do with raising Skyler than Skyler's own parents. A storm is brewing, and despite Lucky's dammable sass, Skyler and Jupiter take him to Content. As if Lucky himself hasn't been enough proof that there's something strange about the place, spending a stormy night at Content only adds to the mystery.

But Skyler's curiosity about Franklin's "system" -- how Franklin can be so kind to his slaves and still make a profit -- is sidetracked when Skyler meets Lucky's fraternal twin, Lucinda, who seems to run the Big House. Lucinda arouses feelings in Skyler that are totally improper for a young white southern gentleman... at least toward a slave girl. They may also be dangerous feelings, and maybe, he thinks, unnatural feelings. If Skyler wasn't confused enough, he is flabbergasted when Lucky asks Skyler to buy him and his sister! Although amazed by this request, Skyler is also puzzled... why would Lucky want to leave a place where he seems to do nothing but eat and sleep? And, what use could he possibly be to Skyler, disregarding the fact that he seems very smart... and he can read!

With a head full of confusion, as well as thoughts of Lucinda, Skyler comes home the next day to find that his father has a gift for him... the young buck, Cartwright.

Cartwright is probably as smart as Lucky, but he's never been "housebroken"... working all his life in his former owner's blacksmith shop. Unlike Lucky, Cartwright is eager to please his new master, though Skyler will have to polish him up and teach him to be a gentleman's servant. Skyler quickly finds that owning another human being is a lot more complicated than owning a horse or a dog.

Although at thirteen Skyler has supposedly learned just about all he is really expected to know about life, it is during the next year that his real education begins.