is very far from the entrance and nowhere near where the other wagons are setting up.  Her grandmother tells her that the other wagons are “white folks’ wagons.” 

T.J. wants to go into the mercantile, to look at a pearl-handled gun.  Stacey asks him why he wants a gun, and he says he needs it for protection.  T.J. starts to shop but then Mr. Barnett stops waiting on him and begins waiting on another customer.  Cassie doesn’t understand why.  

She thinks it might be because the customer is an adult and T.J. is a kid.  Then a white girl is served.  Cassie begins to get frustrated and speaks up, which causes a scene.  Mr. Barnett asks, “Whose little nigger is this!” and Cassie is humiliated, yelling back, “I ain’t nobody’s little nigger!” Mr. Barnett tells Stacey to get Cassie out of there. 

That was Cassie’s first real experience with racism.  She didn’t really understand that, as a black boy, T.J. would be served last.  She also didn’t realize that she shouldn't talk back to the white shopkeeper.  The scene she caused did not make sense to the people in the shop.  Things get worse, however.

Cassie runs into a white girl, Lillian Jean, who says that she bumped her.   

“Well, apologize,” she ordered.

“What?”

“You bumped into me. Now you apologize.”

I did not feel like messing with Lillian Jean. I had other things on my mind. “Okay,” I said, starting past, “I’m sorry.” (Ch. 5)

Cassie has had a long day, and she has already had one embarrassing, confusing, and humiliating encounter, so she apologizes.  Lillian Jean makes it worse by demanding that Cassie get down into the dirt so she can pass.  She is lording her race over Cassie, trying to make her feel inferior.

Lillian Jean's brother Jeremy, who is not racist and is Stacey's friend, tries to get Lillian Jean to back down.  Their father has other ideas though.  He actually physically attacks Cassie, shoving her back.

I braced myself and swept my arm backward, out of Lillian Jean’s reach. But someone caught it from behind, painfully twisting it, and shoved me off the sidewalk into the road. I landed bottom first on the ground.
Mr. Simms glared down at me. “When my gal Lillian Jean says for you to get yo’self off the sidewalk, you get, you hear?”  (Ch. 5)

Cassie says she apologized already, and she finds herself with Big Ma, who tells her to apologize.  She does.  She still does not really understand, and believes it is the cruelest day of her life.  The realities of racism have come crashing down on her.

Chapter One of Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry has much the same import as do all beginning chapters of novels:  It introduces the characters and the setting to the readers, and at least one of the main conflicts and themes is presented. 

In Mildred Taylor's novel, then, the reader becomes acquainted with the Logan family in the 1930s in Mississippi.  In 1887, Grandpa Logan purchased two hundred acres, and in 1918, he puchased two hundred more of the rich land.  However, because there are taxes on all the land and the cotton prices have dropped, Papa Logan has been forced to leave home and work on the railroad.  The Logans are the sole property owners in the community.

Mrs. Logan teaches at the school where her children attend.  On their way to the Great Faith Elementary and Secondary School, the bus for the white children carelessly speeds through a mud puddle, dirtying Little Man, who is fastidious.  As they pass by the Jefferson Davis County School, a large white wooden building with its beautiful lawn, sports field, the contrast between the white school and the weather beaten Great Faith, "a dismal end to an hour's journey," is marked. Similarly, the dress of the children attests to their poverty as patches are on paints and dresses faded.

As the children learn that they will receive worn out books from the white school.  But, when Little Man reads what is notated inside the cover, he becomes angry.  When the teacher brings her son to Mrs. Logan at the end of the day, Mrs. Logan is in the act of placing paper over the chart which so upset her son.  She responds to Miss Crocker's remarks that Clayton Chester Logan behavior was unappreciative; Mrs. Logan says, "...that doesn't mean they have to accept [how things are].  The chapter ends with Miss Crocker gazing suspiciously at Mrs. Logan, whose "ideas were always a bit too radical and her statements a bit too pointed."

Clearly, then, the Logan family as characters stand apart from other black families; they have an independence of spirit and pride which will not go unnoticed by their foes.  With the setting of Mississippi in the 1930s, the racial division promises to figure into the plot.