When her family moves to Philadelphia's Society Hill neighborhood in 1866, Addy, a former slave, discovers that her new home holds dangerous secrets--including one connected to the North Carolina plantation she escaped from only two years earlier.
Daddy Wes tells how Africans were brought to America as slaves, but promises his children that as long as they can hear the rhythm of the earth, they will be free.
In 1928, when her father tears her and her brother from their mother in North Carolina and takes them to live with aunts in Harlem, twelve-year-old Bessie is trapped in a strange place, especially after her father mysteriously disappears.
A brief biography of Oseola McCarty, a hard-working washer woman who, without a formal education herself, donated a portion of her life savings to the University of Southern Mississippi to endow a scholarship fund for needy students.
In 1928, Bessie's father takes her and her brother Eddie from their mother in North Carolina to live with their aunts in Harlem, and then her father mysteriously disappears.
In 1958, Mendy puts herself in danger when she discovers that the Ku Klux Klan is planning to bomb the Highlander Folk School in order to disrupt a visit from Mendy's hero, Eleanor Roosevelt.
