[1] The novel won the 2021 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, and The Black Caucus of the American Library Association First Novelist Award.

Alice falls in love and marries Raymond Campbell, who is part of a group called the National Negro Advancement Society (NNAS), a group that wants to resist integration, achieve a state of separate but actually equal, and make New Jessup its own separate municipality with voting rights to keep the Black people who live there safe from the White families that live across town.

Raymond, Alice, and the other members of NNAS also face pressure to ditch their agenda from organizers aligned with the bigger Civil Rights Movement who are pushing for integration and Black equality, since they feel that separate will never be equal, no matter how much independence Black people can claim from Whites.

They also face pressure from Simeon, a lawyer from Georgia and the National NNAS, who wants to recruit more organizers from town, instead of keeping the organizing a secret, and also to hurry up and push for voting rights instead of waiting to form a separate town first.

But after Raymond’s organizing receives more support from the community than they expect, they decide to stay in town after all.