Ocean State Libraries

The primary narrator is a young girl named Meredith whose mother died just after Meredith and her twin brother were born. Their father, Thomas, is a brooding and diffident man, a doctor we assume is white, although he practices in a poor black New Orleans neighborhood, just as his father devoted his life to making mortuary sculpture for black families. As the novel begins, Thomas is hustling his sleepy children out of the house so that he can leave...