The actress's debut novel draws on her own civil-rights work. In the Freedom Summer of 1964, nineteen-year-old Celeste Tyree — a University of Michigan student, daughter of a Detroit bar owner and numbers man — leaves Ann Arbor against her father's wishes for Pineyville, Mississippi, to teach in a freedom school and prepare Black residents to face the registrar. She arrives in the days when three of her fellow workers are missing and presumed murdered, and the summer educates her in violence, courage, color, and class within her own people as much as in the enemy outside. Newsday called it perhaps the best work of fiction ever done about the civil rights movement.
Author: Denise Nicholas · Original publisher: Agate Bolden (Chicago), 2005
