In the midst of his success as a writer and international lecturer, Clifton Taulbert receives an unexpected invitation to supper in Allendale, South Carolina, one that will challenge every lesson of his childhood. Although the invitation is for the adult twenty-first century African American author, tagging along will be Little Cliff, the colored boy from the Mississippi Delta who is also Clifton Taulbert, bringing with him all he was taught as a child about staying in his "place" and surviving in the Jim Crow South. Transported back into a setting that looks and feels like the cotton fields and shotgun shacks of his childhood, Taulbert finds himself expected to cross racial barriers that no "colored" man could have crossed without dire consequences. The legacies of slavery and segregation lie just beneath the surface of all that Taulbert encounters in Allendale, demanding to be acknowledged. The Invitation is the story of the man and the little boy inside him wrestling with a past they both know so well, while stepping into a future that is still being determined.