Award-winning author Eddie Chuculate recounts his experience growing up in rural Oklahoma, from boyhood to young manhood, in an evocative and vivid voice. "Granny was full-blooded Creek, but the Bureau of Indian Affairs insisted she was thirteen-sixteenths. She showed her card to me. I'd sit at the kitchen table and stare at her when she was eating, wondering how you could be thirteen- sixteenths of anything and if so, what part of her constituted the other three-sixteenths." Growing up impoverished and shuttled between different households, it seemed life was bound to take a certain path for Eddie Chuculate. Despite the challenges he faced, his upbringing was rich with love and bountiful lessons from his Creek and Cherokee heritage, deep-rooted traditions he embraced even as he learned to live within the culture of white, small-town America that dominated his migratory childhood.