Shorty

Johnny Cook is eight-years-old. It's 1933. His father's death leaves Johnny with his siblings and mother to survive on a small farm four years into the Great Depression. Grandpa Eddie asks a black man to help the white family. But Johnny does not want anything to do with black people, already entrenched strongly in his prejudice, a product of his environment. The young boy's sense of justice and fairness grows with him into manhood as Shorty teaches him through life lessons. Johnny tells the story in his words as a transformation takes place in his life. Retold from true accounts, the stories of Johnny and Shorty center around the racial divide in 1930s rural Mississippi to capture how a single black man's difficult life journey changes a poor white family's view of discrimination forever. Humorous, uplifting and brutally realistic, Shorty will create in the reader a desire to reflect on their own approach to fellow human beings.