Several players from different backgrounds try to cope with the pressures of playing football at a major university. Each deals with the pressure differently, some turn to drinking, others to drugs, and some to studying.
Paris Trout is a vile Southern bigot. He owns a store and is a loanshark. He often sues people, and so his lawyer, Harry Seagraves, eventually meets Paris' wife Hannah. A former schoolteacher, she made the mistake of her life when she married Paris, who brutalizes her. Soon Paris goes beyond the overgenerous bounds of what a man in his position can get away with even in the segregated South, leading to a spiral of perverse insanity.
Ex-slave and former Union soldier Gideon Jackson represents other ex-slaves at the constitutional convention, and is soon elected to the U.S. Senate despite opposition from white landowners, law enforcement and the KKK. He unites with sharecropper Abner Lait, who helps Jackson unite ex-slaves and white tenant farmers.
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An overprotective single mother tries to stop her son joining the parachute unit by sending him to the college, fearful that he may end up his life like his father did. He secretly leaves the college and joins the army, but the mother finds out and makes a bet with him that if she passes the basic training, he will leave the unit.
