A coming-of-age novel set among the African Americans of the Deep South in the late 1960s. Seven-year-old Maria Kin Santos is left by her emotionally unstable mother in the care of two elderly spinster aunts she has never met before. Although Maria comes to love her aunts, she dreams of finding her father and spends years searching for him. Eventually, she learns that he is in Los Angeles and sets off to meet him there.