"As a black woman artist who deals with race and identity in my paintings, I resonated with the inner conflicts of Lucy Daniels' beautifully drawn characters in ." "Simple clarity lit onto layers of complex emotions are the brushstrokes by which Lucy Daniels paints her tale of a South never rid of its history. sings to a soulful rhythm of sustenance in the battle between tradition and its invisible enemy, indifference." As a small child in Los Angeles, blue-eyed, red-haired, black-skinned Lily Price, daughter of a flamboyant white musician and a beautiful black singer, glories in the delight her father shows for her and her strikingly "special" appearance. But when tragedy brings Lily and her mother back east to the rigidly conservative home of her fundamentalist minister grandfather in Millboro, North Carolina, "special" is viewed as "freak." Lily's emotional response to this loss is only one of several with which this story demonstrates the power the past wields over the present.