SYNOPSIS:

Synopsis Scout’s alcoholic father dies when she is thirteen and she is left alone in the world. She is sent to live in a small town with her cold-hearted and estranged aunt. Already an outsider because of her ginger hair, she meets Frankie [a boy ; also thirteen] who is from a gipsy family and also therefore considered an outsider. Their nemesis at school is Rocky, the local bully. Frankie and Scout go fishing where they see Elias chopping wood outside his cabin in the hills. Elias is half white; half Comanche and also therefore a social outsider. Frankie and Scout become firm friends and ‘blood brothers’. Scout also befriends her schoolteacher, Cara [who is black]. Cara is attacked in the street one night and Elias fights off her assailant. Elias and Cara become friends. But when Scout’s life seems to be working out , Frankie gets into a fight with Rocky and is stabbed to death. Rocky runs off and Scout is arrested. When questioned by the police, Rocky says that Scout killed Frankie. Shayne [Rocky’s father], a local redneck, goes to the police station and takes Rocky home where Shayne violently assaults him. He tells Rocky that….’you may have started this but I’ll finish it…and the girl.’ Scout is released on bail into the care of her aunt who is ashamed that Scout has dragged her supposedly good name through the mud. Scout runs away into the hills where she meets Elias. He tells her that he saw Rocky stab Frankie because he was fishing in the river and he saw the fight. Elias and Scout go back to Elias’s cabin. Shayne and his sidekicks are out looking for Scout [to kill her]. Elias overpowers them and tells Shayne that he witnessed the fight between Rocky and Frankie and he is going to take Scout into the police station that afternoon. Later that day, Shayne whips up a drunken lynch mob in the local bar and they advance on the police station. But the young local policeman [Wayne] is tipped off about the mob and gives Elias his car keys and tells Elias to get Scout out of there. Shayne and the mob return to the bar but they get a tip-off that Elias has been seen driving up to his cabin with Scout. The lynch mob set off in pursuit. Wayne calls Cara and they drive up to the cabin. In the final shootout, all Shayne’s sidekicks are killed and Shayne is about to shoot Wayne and Elias, who are wounded. Cara shoots Shayne dead. Elias and Wayne are hospitalised. Cara and Scout are excluded from the school by the hypocritical, bible-punching headmaster for their apparent misbehaviour. Elias leaves hospital. Scout says a tearful goodbye to Frankie at his graveside. Elias, Cara and Scout leave the cabin to walk the red road of spiritual truth to a better life on the high plains of Elias’s ancestors.

TO WALK THE RED ROAD