It’s 1946, Faroh Jordan, a young Negro novelist based in Harlem, NY, is not only a new father but is hoping for success in the literary world with his first published book, Lights Out America. Faroh and his wife Marion (librarian), struggle financially to make ends meet. Lights Out America, Faroh is confident, will do that and it does along with a series of best-selling novels.Eventually, Faroh wants out of America. He long-ago rejected his second-class citizenship; burdened by rac...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

Suffering from a terminal illness, Miss Honey Gillette is a world famous/blues singer who believes God has sent her home to die. Or, has God sent Miss Honey home to Plattstown to meet Ruby Martinson, a ten-year-old miracle child? Eventually, Ruby Martinson becomes Miss Ruby Midnight, a jazz singer who in the 1940s sends the jazz world into a tailspin with her vocal gifts. But more importantly, Ruby has come to Chicago to establish herself, and where she is to meet Jimmy “Darkboy” Slade,” a...

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...

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 ...

Money in 1923 is an object of excess, not restraint or caution. New York City is a metropolis of big business and Wall Street and gritty finance. Its the Gilded Age and Maxwell Engelbert De Wolfe loves being immersed in it. A New York-based financier and owner of De Wolfe & Fitch, hes one of the worlds wealthiest men. The fifty-four-year-old De Wolfe is trapped in a loveless marriage to Alexandra Bauer, a marriage arranged between two wealthy German families thirty-one years ago. To satisf...

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...

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...