A black family living in Mississippi during the Depression of the 1930s is faced with prejudice and discrimination which its children do not understand.

In Mississippi, fourteen-year-old Maddy Dangerfield has just impulsively drawn a naked woman on the pages of Genesis in bright red lipstick during Sunday service. The community is scandalized, and her devout, long-suffering mother's response is to force her to spend weekends nursing her Aunt Pip-an outcast who lives on the edge of town. Now Maddy moves between her own home-which she shares with her hard-working, Bible-reading mother and her drinking,...