This is a story about four women in 1950s Richmond, VirginiaJosephine, a young black girl from Philadelphia ventures to Velvet Gardens, a former plantation, now bread and breakfast in Richmond Virginia in search of her mother's last days, only to suffer police brutality, class, and racial indifference. She becomes romantically involved with the black son of an elite civil rights lawyer and dangerously with the white son of a worker at Velvet Gardens.There is Rita Jane, who invited Josephine to the big house, understanding the young girl's sense of emptiness from not knowing her mother's love. Although Rita struggled to flee Velvet Garden with her high school love, she had to return to her privileged upbringing as a ward of the house and wonder if she would go crazy under the shadow of Penelope.Penelope is the descendant of plantation slave owners who strives to enter politics by seizing the time to champion the Manifesto, the growing resistance to the Supreme Court's order to desegregate schools in the 1950s. She is aging and realizes her privileged upbringing and long love affair has provided no self value to her life. Even so, she wants to fight change. But Odessa, the city's fervent social worker, is a constant agitation to the state's Jim Crow laws. She befriends Josephine, whom she witnessed being beaten by the police, and finds that the young girl brashness is a thorn in Penelope's side. As the Manifesto grows to stop integration of schools, she yearns to be elected to office and resists her husband's fear for her safety.