Pete and Alex are brothers, raised together on a dairy farm in the Great Smokey Mountains during the Great Depression. Their hometown is beset by the ignorance and racial intolerance of the post-Reconstruction South. For the two boys, those issues are magnified because Pete is white, and Alex is black. As a boy, Alex’s family is murdered by the Rockingham County Klan. Alex escapes and takes refuge in the milking barn of the Forest Hill Dairy owned by “Poppa” Barnes, an emotionally remote Primitive Baptist preacher. “Poppa” Barnes allows Alex to remain on the dairy if he is willing to work. About the same age, Pete Barnes accepts Alex as his brother, but to the remainder of the family he is only “Boy”. Pete’s bond with Alex strengthens despite living in a small town with a rigid color line. Upon completing high school, Pete and Alex join the Army anticipating the adventure of inevitable war in Europe but are again segregated by Army policy. They do not see each other again until the bloody battle for Mortain where Alex heroically saves Pete’s life. In turn, Alex is grievously wounded and saved by Pete’s medical skills. Alex recovers in Margate, England, but experiences the same bigotry and disrespect he had grown up with. Alex commits himself to creating a life out of the shadow of the Barnes family. Pete and Alex remain estranged until reunited at Fort Jackson, South Carolina in 1969. Military Police Chief, Major Alex Broadnax, is responsible for investigating the brutal, off-base beating of Colonel Pete Barnes, Chief of Womack Army Hospital. To achieve this, Major Broadnax must navigate the swirling racial waters of the 1960’s deep South, the hostility between military and civilian authorities, and his disaffection from the Barnes family.