For Sugar, life is anything but sweet.Ten-year-old Sugar lives on River Road Plantation along the banks of the Mississippi River. Slavery is over, but working in the sugarcane fields all day doesn’t make her feel very free. Thankfully, Sugar knows how to make her own fun, telling stories, climbing trees, and playing with forbidden friend Billy, the plantation owner’s son.Then a group of Chinese workers arrives to help harvest the cane. Sugar wants to know everything about them—she loves the way they dress, their unfamiliar language, and, best of all, the stories they tell of dragons and emperors. Unfortunately, other folks on the plantation feel differently—they’re fearful of these new neighbors and threatened by their different customs. Sugar knows things will only get better if everyone works together, so she sets out to help the two communities realize they’re not so different after all.Sugar is the inspiring story of a strong, spirited young girl who grows beyond her circumstances and helps others work toward a brighter future.

Fourteen-year-old Stella, orphaned just after the Civil War, fights to keep her family's plantation and fulfill her father's desire to turn land over to the people who have worked on it for generations, but first she must find her father's hidden deed and will.

Born with a withered leg and hand, Pascal, who is about twelve years old, joins other former slaves in a search for a farm and the freedom which it promises.

Violet Travilla and her large Southern family must adjust to the many changes in their lives brought about by the end of the Civil War.

Elsie Dinsmore Travilla, who has always tried to live a truly Christian life, returns to Ion Plantation after the Civil War to discover that old hatreds run deep and that she must rely on her faith to withstand the Ku Klux Klan.

From 1865 to 1869, freed slaves Ezra--ten years old at the end of the Civil War--and his father deal with their newfound liberty, traveling from their former master's North Carolina plantation to finally settle in a community of free blacks in Charleston, South Carolina, where they gain education and professions.

After fighting as a Union officer in the Civil War, former slave Obi Booker returns to South Carolina to make a new life for himself and his beloved Easter.

From 1865 to 1869, freed slaves Ezra--ten years old at the end of the Civil War--and his father deal with their newfound liberty, traveling from their former master's North Carolina plantation to finally settle in a community of free blacks in Charleston, South Carolina, where they gain education and professions.