I was reading about a homeless man

I am reading a book about a man who was not a slave because slavery was supposed to be abolished, but guess what? They still treated blacks as if they were. He tells in the book about fixing the flat tire of a white woman, and three white boys come and tie a grass rope around his neck and try to hang him and the woman stood there and did nothing. Then he told about jumping a freight car and going to Texas, where he was treated worse, and that was the end of chapter one. Come up to today, he meets a woman named Debbie, who made him talk about all this, and I fell asleep at this point.

More later about this.