Douglas Turner Ward

To protect his wife's "secret", a small-town Southern lawyer in the 1960s decides to defend a young man accused of murder, all while running for Congress and encountering personal threats to his family.

A multigenerational story of the lives of several black women who call an inner-city tenement home.

Over a single, pivotal Saturday in 1930s Harlem, 14-year-old John Grimes wrestles with his religious calling and his fraught relationship with his abusive, hypocritical stepfather, Gabriel. Extended flashbacks explore the oppressive Southern past and personal histories of John's mother, his aunt, and Gabriel, ultimately illuminating the generational trauma and complex family secrets that shape his life.

Russell B. Parker, a former vaudeville hoofer, is a man of big dreams but small ambitions. He hardly works at all in fact, often spending the time incessantly playing checkers with his friend, William Jenkins. Parker lives with Theopolis and Bobby, his two unemployed sons, and Adele, his hard-working daughter. The ghost of his dead wife, a woman who drove herself into an early grave working to support the family, nags at his conscience.

At the beginning of the 19th century a man and his son settle in Arizona which used to be a frontier state and full of criminals at that time.