Absalom's daughters : a novel
(Book)

"Self-educated and brown skinned, Cassie works full-time in her grandmother's laundry in rural Mississippi. Illiterate and white, Judith falls for 'colored music' and dreams of life as a big-city radio star. These teenaged girls are half sisters. And when they catch wind of their wayward father's inheritance coming down in Virginia, they hitch their hopes to a road trip together to claim what's rightly theirs. In an old junk car, with a frying pan, a ham, and a few dollars hidden in a shoe, they set off through the American Deep South of the 1950s, a bewitchingly beautiful landscape as well as one bedeviled by racial strife and violence." -- Dust jacket.