Two half sisters, one black and one white, embark on a risky road trip through the 1950s Jim Crow South in this spellbinding story of identity and race.Self-educated and brown skinned, Cassie works full time in her grandmother's laundry in rural Mississippi. Illiterate and white, Judith falls for "colored music" and dreams of life as a big-city radio star. These teenaged girls are half sisters. And when they catch wind of their wayward father's inheritance coming down in Virginia, they hitch their hopes on a road trip together to claim what's rightly theirs.In an old junker of a car, with a frying pan, a ham, and a few dollars hidden in a shoe, they set off through the American Deep South of the 1950s, a bewitchingly beautiful landscape as well as one bedeviled by racial striving and violence.