The boy and his mother welcome the dog home.

The dog can only use three legs, has only one ear and one eye, and no longer barks. The father tells the boy not to come back to the jail, and he goes home.Ībout two months after the father's arrest, the boy awakes to the sound of faint whining, goes outside, and finds Sounder standing there. Their conversation is strained and difficult. The boy gives the mangled cake to his father anyway and tells him that Sounder might not be dead. Finally the boy is admitted, and the guard breaks the cake into pieces, saying he suspects it could hide something which could help the boy's father escape. When he arrives, the guard treats him rudely. The boy helps to look after his three younger siblings and experiences the intense loneliness of the cabin.įor Christmas, the boy's mother makes a four-layer cake for him to take to his father in jail. In the father's absence, the family survives on the money the mother makes by selling cracked walnuts. While his mother cautions him not to 'be all hope', the boy searches for the dog every day for weeks. Returning to the scene of the shooting, the boy finds a part of Sounder's ear. The arrested man's son goes looking for Sounder but cannot find him. Sounder chases after them, and one of the deputies shoots him with a shotgun.

They feast for three days, but finally the sheriff and two of his deputies burst into the cabin and arrest the father for stealing the ham. The family subsists on fried corn mush, biscuits, and milk gravy until one morning they wake up to the smell of boiling ham. The father and his dog, Sounder, go hunting each night, but the hunting is inadequate. The black sharecropper's family is poor and hungry. Sounder won the Newbery Award in 1970 and was made into a major motion picture in 1972. The boy hears his father may be in Bartow and later Gilmer counties, but the author does not specify where the boy lives. The author notes prisoners were hauled in 'mule-drawn wagons', and the mention of chain gangs places an upper limit to the story of 1955 when the practice ended. The author refers to the various characters by their relationship or their role in the story. Sounder, the dog's name, is the only character name used in the book. Although the family's difficulties increase when the father is imprisoned for stealing a ham from work, the boy still hungers for an education. It is the story of an African-American boy living with his sharecropper family. Sounder is a young adult novel by William H.

William h armstrong