On a hot-as-hell
day in June 1949,
Johnnie Roy Houston...

 a nineteen-year-old-black man returns home to the  

bottomland of the central Texas town of Bastrop to celebrate his favorite day—Juneteenth—with his family and friends. This is the day blacks celebrate the Emancipation Proclamation. But within twenty-four hours, he is arrested by a pack of blood-thirsty lawmen for beating and robbing the town’s prominent white doctor of thirty dollars. As Houston is hauled to a holding cell, his eyes meet his twin brother’s eyes, who is being escorted out. Without a word spoken, their glances say it all—betrayal. With a blood-stained confession and a thirty-minute trial, a jury—more like a vigilante mob—returns a Jim Crow sentence: fifty years.

     In prison, Johnnie fends off lifers by night and the warden’s bosses by day. He toils on hoe squads, prepares the walking dead on death row, and survives solitary by dreaming up ways of getting even with Ray. Paroled after twenty-six years to the mean streets of Dallas, Johnnie now does the hardest time—living in the free world on the same street, doors down from his twin, still dogging him with his trouble ways. Will Johnnie carry out that solitary dream of getting even or will he forgive his brother and relieve himself of the weight of past injustices at the hands of family and his hometown, so he can finally walk in his own

sunshine, unshackled,

at peace?