Tell Me a Tale is a novel set during the last years of slavery in North Carolina plantation township. During the decade following the Civil War, the village of Red Springs, NC had not changed very much. It is steeped in the socially rigid behavior of the old South, the white South. A young black man named Moses has traveled many long miles to reach McMillan's General Store. Here, sitting around the stove in their usual haunt, he finds the men he seeks. The young man enters the ill-kept emporium and finds the four old-timers gossiping and whittling. The very presence of a negro shocks them, but they don't recognize Moses as a former slave from a nearby plantation. Still bitter and angry over the Emancipation of the area's slaves, these four very unreconstructed whites are in no mood to listen to anything a colored person has to say, let alone one whose motives they automatically, instinctively suspect. With the help of some fine cognac Moses has brought along for the occasion, he lightens the spirits of these mean old codgers with drink and the remarkable story he spins out over the next several hours, Moses tells them a tale of a young male slave, the boys white father who keeps a painful distance from the son he refuses to acknowledge, the youth's wise "uncle"-a proud and complex former slave named Ben-and the fire that destroyed his former master's plantation. It is a story rich in love and hope, but ultimately poisoned by the ruinous deeds of hateful men.