Melodye Rosales

Skinny Nora Jean Sampson and her friends at R.B. Nolen Elementary School are kept busy with a snake in the girls' bathroom, a scary Halloween fun house, and a pizza party in the library.

After their escape from North Carolina to Philadelphia in the summer of 1864, Addy and her mother begin their new life as free people as her mother gets a paying job and Addy goes to school and learns a lesson in true friendship.

Determined to be the strawbeater during the corn shucking party, Jess, a small young slave boy, wrestles a bigger, stronger boy for the honor.

Addy and her parents are together in Philadelphia, but Addy misses her brother and sister and her Auntie Lula and Uncle Solomon and wants desperately for her family to be reunited.