Fifty-two-year-old Maurice Teardrop Williams is a world famous blues mansinger, guitarist, and songwriter. But since Maureen, his wife of thirty years, died seven months ago, Teardrop has lost the joy he once found in performing music on the road with his band, the Tearmakers. With his light-blue guitar called Lillian, he returns home to Walker City, Iowa.Finding it difficult and lonely to stay in the home he once shared with Maureen, he moves in with his daughter, Arlene, and his ...

Sixty-eight-year-old Della Ballad has a bad heart, but she still has a healthy outlook on life. Shes been suffering with heart disease for the last seven years; she has no intention of letting it beat her. Della plans to fight has hard as she can.But heart disease isnt the only battle taking place. Since childhood, Dellas daughter, Margaret, and Dellas niece, Darlene Winston, have been fighting for Dellas love. The illness has only made the situation worse. Their rivalry has permea...

Arfel Booker is a great young blues musician in the 1940s South. One night, after playing a blues gig in a new town, a beautiful woman takes him back to her log cabin to make love. In the morning (after blacking out from too much liquor), he awakens to an unwelcome surprise. Instead of the woman, an unfamiliar white man is in the bed, and the mans throat has been slashed with Arfels knife.Arfel knows hes been framed, so he makes a run for it and heads north by hopping trains. Once ...

In a lily-white northeastern city of Pittsfield, sixteen-year-old Jimmy Robinson (quarterback), and Billy Mack (fullback) are national high school all-American football players. They have been teammates since Pop Warner football. Billy is black and Jimmy is white. A racial tragedy occurs in this lily-white city. The tragedy is not done by a racist or a bigot that will destroy Billy and Jimmy’s deep brotherly relationship but from an unexpected source—a tragedy so horrific that no parent wo...

Modecai Jefferson is a young, dynamic 1940s jazz musician who carries his piano on his back, hears music every second of the day, and enjoys playing for his lover and biggest fan in Way City, AlabamaDelores Bonet. To Modecai, he and Delores are like black love notes on a musical page. But all of that is about to change the day he hears a recording of up-and-coming Harlem jazz trumpeter, Bunny Greensleeves. If he wants to make a name for himself, Modecai needs to find a way out of Alabama a...

Sometimes, fate just has it out for you. Shirley Cox has beaten the odds to create a successful career in the insurance industry. She and her fifteen-year-old son, Trumain, are living a comfortable life filled with promise. Shirley is proud of her sona bright, hardworking, and ambitious young man who has earned his place on the honor roll. But in a heartbeat, everything changes. Shirley loses her job, and the family is forced to move to Clifton Heights, a crime-ridden, drug-infested part o...

When trainer Frank Black Machine Whaley of View Point, Texas, dies of a heart attack in 1946, Elegant Raines, an eighteen-year-old black prizefighter, must find a new trainer. Raines calls on Leemore Pee-Pot Manners, a boxing trainer who lives in Longwood, West Virginia. Any honest man would say Pee-Pot knows more about boxing than anyone alivewhether that man is black or white.Rainess goal is to become the heavyweight champion of the world. Under Pee-Pots tutelage Raines wins not ...

It is June 1925, the dawning of a new, spectacular riverboat season, and Noble Princes Red-Hot Rhythm Band is set to play hot jazz on the Mississippi!Walter Von Bulow, the owner of the Morning Queen, has recently discovered Lucinda Lucky Martinson. Luckys a talented young jazz singer. Von Bulow hires her in the year 1925, to sing in Princes band. But shes in New Orleans for other reasons: Lucky Martinsons on a personal quest to reconcile her past. Luckys left Harlem and her boyfrie...

James “Brick” Carter is the father of two boys: James Carter Jr. and Justin Carter. A New Yorker born in Harlem, he lives in Queens with his wife, Florence. Brick is a subway engineer for New York’s transit system. In his youth, his parents nicknamed him Brick based on his stubborn ways. A Black man, Brick believes in family values and job advancement in the workplace from one generation to the next. He preaches that. Therefore, that value is to be applied to his sons James Jr. and Justin....

Camilla Valentine is a black, twenty-four year old farm girl whose striking beauty stuns Hawk Delano Thompson at first sight at the colored rodeo in Oklahoma. Their brief social engagement leads to Hawk corresponding with Camilla via a series of back and forth letters. Those letters reveal Camilla’s childhood dream to become a black actress in the year 1949—stage and film. Hawk could help her with that: fulfill her dream. Hawk, at twenty-seven, is a successful entrepreneur with big ideas l...

0liver T. Harrison III, an anthropologist/ author/philosopher/ retired college professor, lived on Oak Street in the small city of Clarksville. When Thaddeus (Thad) Robert Carter II was young, he was thrilled by Oliver T. Harrison’s beautifully-built nineteenth century house. At fifteen, Thad got his wish: he was a paperboy whose paper route included Oliver T. Harrison (thrill). During many months of delivering the Clarksville Journal to Mr. Harrison, Thad had been the perfect paperboy, an...

A strict Christian woman, shy, unworldly; twenty-eight-year-old Lenora La Roche is a librarian in Joseph City (fictional), Louisiana. She's lived with a horrible, unsolved family mystery inJoseph City for most of her life.Lenora's grandmother, Adelaide La Roche, who raised her, taught her the Bible and how to love God. It's how Lenora approached life: with a sense of purity and kindness toward the world.A wicked house fire kills Adelaide. But hidden in a closet was a...