Knights Crossing — Jess Mowry

The year is 1860 in the United States of America. The industrial revolution has brought railroads for fast transportation. Steamships cross the seas, and riverboats ply the waterways. Telegraph provides instant communication; and machines are beginning to replace much dreary human labor. But, thirteen-year-old Skyler Knight returns from a year of schooling in New Orleans 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. Skyler, raised on his family's huge plantation, 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. But, something new HAS come to Knight's Crossing. After getting off the train, Skyler encounters two black boys of around his 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 a small plantation of deep in the bayou. There are rumors that Franklin is too kind to his slaves; that he's allowed them to get fat and lazy. ...And worse, "uppity,” and Lucky seems to confirm all these rumors. Although at thirteen Skyler has supposedly learned all he is expected to know about life, it's during the next year that his real education begins.