During the summer of 1964 in rural South Carolina, a young girl is given a home by three black, beekeeping sisters. As she enters their mesmerizing secret world of bees and honey, she discovers a place where she can find the single thing her heart longs for most.

In Jackson, Mississippi, in 1962, there are lines that are not crossed. With the civil rights movement exploding all around them, three women start a movement of their own, forever changing a town and the way women--black and white, mothers and daughters--view one another.

After Othella--the daughter of the town tramp in Shreveport, Louisiana--convinces her to give her baby away, fifteen-year-old Ruby Jean Upshaw runs away to New Orleans, where nothing can quell her simmering rage at Othella for persuading her to let her baby go.

In this novel the author takes you back to where it all began in A Time to Kill. Now we return to that famous courthouse in Clanton as Jake Brigance once again finds himself embroiled in a fiercely controversial trial; a trial that will expose old racial tensions and force Ford County to confront its tortured history. Seth Hubbard is a wealthy man dying of lung cancer. He trusts no one. Before he hangs himself from a sycamore tree, Hubbard leaves...

In 1831, Prudence Crandall opened a school for young white ladies. When asked by an African American teenager if she might join the class, Crandall, whose sympathies were with the abolitionists, agreed. So begins a jolting episode in which Crandall turned her school into one for girls of color, and is both tormented and sued by the citizenry of Canterbury, Connecticut, who wanted no part of African Americans in their town.

Before John Glenn orbited the Earth or Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of professionals worked as 'Human Computers,' calculating the flight paths that would enable these historic achievements. Among these were a coterie of bright, talented African-American women. Segregated from their white counterparts by Jim Crow laws, these 'colored computers,' as they were known, used slide rules, adding machines, and pencil and paper to support America's...

The author and poet recalls the anguish of her childhood in Arkansas and her adolescence in northern slums.