This is not a novel constructed for plot or symbolism. It is a real person's first-person account of their real life, and it is literally the only one of its kind, because Austin Reed was literate, and because his life was riddled by complications. He fought legal issues his whole life, sometimes escaping jail, and then getting in trouble again. The point of view that he offers is that the penal system is set up to disenfranchise Black people in America, because everyone assumes because of his race that he is guilty.
For the best instance of this, look at the tragic outcome of his relationship to the farmer who hires him as a laborer and apprentice. At first, it seems that perhaps Reed might escape his frustrating fate as a disenfranchised person by pursuing a career in farming. After all, he is learning the right skills for the job, but then right at the finish line, there is some kind of accident, and the farmer tells the authorities that Reed started the fire on his property. Reed says he didn't do it.
Sometimes Austin Reed seems to be lying in the book, but that raises the very question that he deliberates; should people give him the benefit of the doubt? He feels completely disenfranchised, which means that over the course of time, he has been made to suffer tremendously, and if the reader tries to dismiss his point of view, then perhaps he is literally correct in his social criticism, because the question was always about assumption. Do people assume he is innocent until proven guilty? Typically they assume his guilty until proven innocent, and that is the issue - not Reed's particular truthfulness.
