Sounder

Content Warning: This section of the guide features depictions of racism, violence, physical abuse, incarceration, cruelty to animals, and animal illness, and death.

Months turn into years, and the boy’s curiosity and longing for his father continue. Sounder stays at home, always waiting eagerly for the boy on the road by the cabin. The boy continues to help his mother with her work, but whenever there is news about convicts working at a road camp, the boy always leaves to go investigate it.

When the boy sees a group of convicts whitewashing a stone path, he approaches the wire fence and watches them carefully. A guard throws an iron scrap at him, shocking him and wounding his fingers, and the convicts ignore the commotion as they work. The boy assumes that his father isn’t there, since he imagines that his father would protect him from the guard if he were. As the guard shoos the boy away, the boy fantasizes about throwing the iron scrap back at the guard, just as David did to Goliath.

The boy leaves and walks through town, pausing at a schoolhouse where the children have finished their studies for the day. He meets a kindly elderly school teacher who invites him into his home to wash the blood from his hands.