Nine-year-old Danny, an orphan, hitches a ride on a train one night in 1937 Georgia and before he knows it, he has a home in Harlem with Duke Ellington, meets many famous musicians, and tours America and, later, the world with Duke's orchestra.

A woman in nineteenth-century Virginia is driven by insane jealousy to mistreat her beautiful mulatto slave whom she suspects of having an affair with her miller husband.

"The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it's not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it's everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Ten years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other secretly passes for white, and...