The Sum of His Worth is the gripping Southern saga of a free-spirited white boy who tries to defend a Negro friend against a virulent Ku Klux Klan. Set in the violent civil rights era of the 1950s in an Alabama town, the novel gives us a unique view of the tragedies and hardships both black and white Southerners endured under a hundred years of Jim Crow laws.
When young Sonny Poe witnesses a lynching in the midnight woods, everything in his life changes. At first fearful the Klan will find him out, then ridiculed for having a Negro friend, he befriends a progressive doctor and together they take a deadly stand for the town's African American community against generations of enslaving abuses. "Doctor Joe" and Sonny must suffer betrayals, beatings, arrest and finally exile in a story told through the compassionate, lyrical voice of the teenagera coming-of-age story that can only end in tragedyand hope.