A girl, abandoned by her mother when she was three, moves to a small town in Florida with her father. There, she adopts an orphaned dog she names Winn-Dixie. The bond between the girl and her special companion brings together the people in a small Florida town and heals her own troubled relationship with her father.

The life of an aging black slave, Tom, and the people he interacts with.

Dixie is caught operating a whorehouse, and is sentenced to 90 days house arrest in a convent! Can Dixie bend to the ways of the convent nuns to avoid jail?

On one of his bratty son Eric's annual visits, the plutocrat U.S. Bates takes him to his department store and offers him anything in it as a gift. Eric chooses a black janitor who has made him laugh with his antics. At first the man suffers many indignities as Eric's "toy", but gradually teaches the lonely boy what it is like to have and to be a friend.

A bubble-brained Philadelphia waitress witnesses a murder during the Mardi Gras festivities in New Orleans and finds herself stalked by the killer.