San Antonio College Library

On the farm of Ruth and Charles Standard is a tiny cemetery of mostly uncut rock and stones. It is a remnant from the days when their land was a small patch of a great tobacco plantation. Residing there, from generations long past, are slaves who were laid to rest under the ground they once worked. One marker tells a far different story. It is the marker of an infant that reads, "Kate. Born and died the same week. Budded on earth to blossom in heaven"....

"JJ Ferguson has returned home to Pinewood, North Carolina, to build his dream house and to pursue his high school sweetheart, Ava. But as he reenters his former world, where factories are in decline and the legacy of Jim Crow is still felt, he's startled to find that the people he once knew and loved have changed just as much as he has. Ava is now married and desperate for a baby, though she can't seem to carry one to term. Her husband, Henry, has...

In 1925, Josephine is the proud owner of a thriving farm. As a child, she channeled otherworldly power to free herself from slavery. Now, her new neighbor, a white woman named Charlotte, seeks her company, and an uneasy friendship grows between them. But Charlotte has also sought solace in the Ku Klux Klan, a relationship that jeopardizes Josephine's family. Nearly one hundred years later, Josephine's descendant, Ava, is a single mother who has just...

The impact of a child's drowning on a black family in 1925 Washington, especially on the 12-year-old sister who was baby-sitting the girl. Told against the background of the lot of blacks at the time.

The story of Black April "a giant negro foreman" of a plantation who dominates the lives and love affairs of all the other black folk. Poignant portrait of daily life and folk beliefs of the Gullah African-American of the South Carolina coast and nearby islands.

Learning that a company plans to dig up the area where her mother is buried, supposedly with a cache of jewels, Billy Beede, poor and pregnant, heads for Arizona to rescue her mother's body and search for the jewels that could bring her a new life.

An evocative, delicately comic story of a girl's coming of age. Born in 1949 in a private blacks-only hospital in rural Georgia, Lena is the third child and longed-for first daughter of Nellie and Jonah, who own the local bar and liquor store. From the moment of her birth in a rural black hospital in Georgia, Lena McPherson is recognized as a special child, with the power to see ghosts and predict the future. Despite her extraordinary talent, Lena...

Iris Courtney, a young white woman living in upstate New York in the decade prior to the civil rights movement, begins a clandestine relationship with Jinx Fairchild, a black man who had defended her in a fatal street fight with a white man.

The perfect wife and mother of three grown children, Marilyn Grimes copes with the problems of midlife as she struggles to recall some of her own postponed dreams and reinvent her marriage, friendships, family, and herself.