The Learning Tree relates two crucial years in the life of Newt Winger. It opens with a terrible tornado that causes death and destruction in the small Kansas town of Cherokee Flats and leads to Newt’s sexual awakening as he is comforted during the storm by Big Mabel. The novel concludes with the deaths of Newt’s mother, Sarah, and of Marcus Savage, whose last act before his own death is his attempt to murder Newt in revenge for Newt’s testimony against Marcus’s father.

Although death plays an ever-present role, The Learning Tree is also about growing up in small-town America in the early part of the twentieth century. Cherokee Flats, with a population of six thousand, is home to both African Americans and whites. Although African Americans cannot compete with whites in athletic events or eat in the same ice cream parlor, black and white children often play together. The high school is integrated, but the lower grades are not.

Some experiences transcend racial boundaries. The rural nature of Cherokee Flats gives Newt and his companions the opportunity to hunt, swim, and experience the joys and sorrows that befall all children. Like most mothers, Sarah encourages Newt’s academic pursuits. She dreams that he will eventually find a better life. She expresses her faith that the next generation of African Americans will make a new world for themselves, a world different from that of their parents. Sarah, a strongly religious woman, impresses upon Newt that good people and bad people come in all colors, and that all, regardless of color, have the possibility of experiencing redemption, even Marcus Savage, who was sentenced to reform school for beating up a local white farmer, and even Clint, her drunken son-in-law, who constantly threatens to kill his wife. Although Sarah hopes that Newt will eventually get away, she notes that the town is like a fruit tree, with good fruit and bad fruit, and “you can learn just as much here about people and things as you can learn any place else. . . . No matter if you go or stay, think of Cherokee Flats . . . till the day you die—let it be your learnin’ tree.”

Newt’s first love is Arcella Jefferson, and she is to be the only love of his life. Arcella, however, turns from Newt to Chauncey Cavanaugh, an older white boy whose father is Judge Cavanaugh, an important figure in the community. Arcella never explains her decision, but Newt ruminates that it might have been Chauncey’s money or his automobile. Perhaps she might even have liked Chauncey. Whatever the reason for her change of affections, the “only thing wrong with her for Chauncey was her color.” Chauncey gets her pregnant.

Rural Kansas is not the Deep South, but racial differences still matter. Newt fears death and worries that interracial violence might destroy the black community. His fear culminates in the murder of Jake Kiner, a white farmer, by Booker Savage, Marcus’s father, who then places the murder weapon in the hands of a drunken white man, Silas Newall. Newt, who had been working for Kiner, secretly observes the killing, but he remains silent, concerned about what might happen if he reveals that a black man had murdered a white in Cherokee Flats. His conscience compels him to confide in his mother. At Silas Newall’s trial, Newt courageously relates what he witnessed. Booker, in the courtroom at the time, attempts to flee. Some whites threaten to lynch Booker, who commits suicide rather than surrender.

Marcus, Booker’s son, blames Newt for his father’s death and vows revenge. Sarah, who...