Nineteen-year-old University of Michigan sophomore Celeste Tyree is on a train in the middle of the night, bound for Mississippi in the summer of 1964 - Freedom Summer. Young volunteers from across the country have come to the state to take part in the civil rights movement, helping to organize voter registration projects. Celeste is assigned to work in the small town of Pineyville, a place best known for a notorious lynching that occurred only a few years before.Celeste quickly gets to know some of Pineyville's residents, particularly Mrs. Geneva Owens, the deeply religious older widow in whose home she stays. She tutors the town's children in a "freedom school" and becomes close to Sissy Tucker, a bright young girl whose father wants her to have nothing to do with the interloper from the North. But the main focus of her work is to prepare a select few townspeople, led by their well-educated minister, to pass the state's tortuous voting test and defy almost a century of Jim Crow laws designed to exclude the state's "Negro" citizens.Back home in Detroit, Celeste's father, Shuck - bar owner, ex-numbers man, and resident of genteel Outer Drive - is restless while Celeste is in harm's way. Though it was his own "race man" views that shaped his daughter into a movement volunteer, Shuck feels out of step with what he sees happening to Detroit and its increasingly poor Negro population. He spends the summer roaming the city and brooding on the past, especially his failed marriage to Wilamena, Celeste's mother and the love of his life.As the summer unfolds, Pineyville's oppressive heat and isolation magnify the violence that shadows its Negro community. There's no radio, let alone TV, and Celeste has no real confidants except the few other volunteers who come to check in on her project. Among those is Ed Jolivette, a young Louisiana-born veteran of the movement to whom she is immediately and profoundly drawn. Celeste struggles with her loneliness, her fear, her confused feelings about her mother, her uncertainty over whether she can have an effect on Pineyville's beaten-down Negro citizens, and her ambivalence about the doctrine of nonviolence - especially after she sees a male movement volunteer pulled out of their car and given a horrific beating by Mississippi state troopers.When her young friend Sissy goes missing, Celeste and Pineyville's Negro community grapple with the realization that evil can take unanticipated forms. As she prepares her adult students for their showdown with the country registrar, the town's simmering potential for violence comes to a boil.By summer's end, Celeste learns there are no easy answers to the questions that preoccupy her - about violence and nonviolence, about race, identity, and color, and about the strength of love and family bonds. Read Less