Jo and Beth Larky rip apart a rural county in Missouri in the 1930s when they rape a handsome, educated mulatto from St. Louis. The county sheriff and a township constable are whipsawed by four militant black preachers who want their own treated right and hundreds of beer guzzling roughnecks who want the "nigger sonofabitch hung for screwing a white woman." Both Sheriff Abner Sorenson and Constable Albert Barnes know that Clay Pool has done nothing wrong, but they persuade him to voluntarily stay in the county jail to let the controversy cool down. It works only briefly. Under threats of an economic boycott from the black ministers and a lynching by white roughnecks, Barnes devises and Sorenson agrees to a fake Ku Klux Klan jail break in which Barnes, the black ministers, and four coerced roughnecks attack the jail, wound the sheriff and his deputies, and spirit away Clay Pool to Pittsburgh after fabricating his drowning in the Mississippi River. In the weeks following the jailbreak, the ministers let it subtly be known to their congregations that their brother is safe up north. The four white roughnecks, under orders from Sorenson, hint in beer hall conversations that "the goddam nigger is Mississippi gar bait." Four or five months later, black haters all over the county sheepishly realize that they have been flimflammed, "fucked, faded, and laughed at," because Clay Pool is not at the bottom of the River but in Pittsburgh, probably messing around with more white women. "Serves them damyankees right."