Plot
Runaway boy Jesse Thompson, hoping to earn enough money to support his mother, follows a gang of other boys. After an infraction gets them all in trouble, they are forced to work in a fenced and guarded turpentine camp, climbing and tapping trees. They are free to leave only if they can first pay off bills they ran up at the company store (peonage). Trapped in a state of de facto slavery, they decide to strike for better food after one boy gets dizzy from hunger and falls from a tree, resulting in the amputation of his arm. When their protest fails, the boys decide to write a letter about the conditions of their detention to the U.S. President's wife, but it is intercepted. The boys believe one of their number is a "snitch", but later discover differently.
Read more about this topic: Boy Slaves
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“There saw I how the secret felon wrought,
And treason labouring in the traitor’s thought,
And midwife Time the ripened plot to murder brought.”
—Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?–1400)
“The plot! The plot! What kind of plot could a poet possibly provide that is not surpassed by the thinking, feeling reader? Form alone is divine.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)
“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)