Bertha Louise “Cid” Ricketts Sumner (1890-1970) wrote ten novels including Quality (1946) and Tammy Out of Time (1948). Quality became the Oscar-nominated, Elia Kazan-directed movie Pinky and her three Tammy novels inspired four movies (starring Debbie Reynolds and later Sandra Dee), a hit single, and a 1960s sitcom. At age 80. Sumner was beaten to death by her teenage grandson.
"She has written the most profound approach yet to the race issue. A superior piece of literature from all angles. Every word she writes is true." Birmingham News
Boston nursing school graduate Pinkey Johnson has blond hair, blue eyes and a secret-- she's actually black. She's managed to fit in naturally among her new friends in the North, but she never quite fit within the small, southern town she came from. But now, on the eve of marrying a white doctor, and forced to tell him the truth about herself, she returns to Mississippi, where she must face the racism and inequities that are a way of life for blacks in the south of the 1940s. And yet she stays, struggling to find both herself and her place in a world that's dangerously black and white.