Norman Pelham left his family's farm in Vermont to fight against the rebels in the Civil War. He suffers a head wound and is found in the woods by a runaway slave, Leah. Leah is young and beautiful and, for Norman, it is love at first sight. He takes her home to Vermont.
His mother and sister are not thrilled to that Norman has married a black woman, but they accept it. Norman takes over the farm and he and Leah have three kids, two girls and a boy.
There are no other black people in rural Vermont where the Pelhams live. Leah encounters a black man at a fair and she starts brooding about her past. She decides she needs to confront her past and try to locate her relatives she left behind. So she leaves the farm and heads down south. What she finds out disturbs her greatly and she returns home to Vermont only to commit suicide.
Her youngest child is wrecked by his mother's death and grows up to runaway from the farm, never to return. He enters into a life of crime as a bootlegger. But he comes to a bad end, never telling his only child, Foster, the truth about his past. Finding a letter in his father's effects, Foster learns that he has family in Vermont and travels to the farm, which is now being run by Norman & Leah's two old-maid daughters. Foster is totally surprised to discover that his grandmother was a black woman. Getting to know his two aunts and learning about the grandmother's death, Foster decides he will go down south and try to understand what was so terrible that his grandmother preferred to be dead rather than live with the truth.
This is really engrossing family saga. I kept hoping that things would work out for these sad yet worthy people and it was heartbreaking to see them suffer and fall. But young Foster is the one who uncovers the past and brings a measure of justice to the author of his grandmother's despair. Just a wonderful story, I enjoyed tremendously.
Publishers Weekly review: https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-87113-765-4.
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