Ivoe Williams, precocious daughter of a Muslim cook and a Texas metalsmith, ignites a lifelong obsession with journalism when she steals a newspaper from her mother's white employer. Eventually she flees the Jim Crow South with her family for Kansas City, where Ivoe and her former teacher and lover, Ona, found the first female-run African American newspaper. Barnett's novel gives us an epic vision of the hardships and injustices that defined an era.
