Porter Osborne Jr. is a precocious, sensitive, and rambunctious boy
trying to make it through adolescence during the depression years. On a
red-clay farm in Georgia he learns all there is to know about cotton
chopping, hog killing, watermelon thumping, and mule handling. School
provides a quick course in practical joking, schoolboy crushes, athletic
glory, and clandestine sex. But it is Porter's family - his genteel,
patient mother, his swarm of cousins, his snuff-dipping grandmother,
and, most of all, his beloved though flawed father - who teach Porter
the painful truths about growing up strong enough to run with the
horsemen.