Summary

“The Beach” is the first chapter in Part One and introduces John Turner Harris and his friends, the four Williams boys, a group of young black boys living in Chicago. On July 27, 1919, the five boys sought to beat the oppressive heat and headed to the beaches along Lake Michigan, aiming for a strip of beach between Twenty-Sixth and Twenty-Ninth Street that was frequented by Chicago’s South-Side residents. Unlike other American cities at the time, Chicago allowed black and white people to eat at the same restaurants, go to the same schools, and did not formally delineate which beaches were for blacks and which for whites. Instead, an ‘invisible’ line separated the races. John and the Williams boys quickly found a small island to claim as their own and, after having built a wooden raft, they began to...