description: In Crossing Blood Nanci Kincaid tells a story of secrets - the secrets white girls don't tell and the secrets they long to know about black people.Lucy Conyers lives with her brothers, mother, and stepfather in Tallahassee, in the last house in the white part of town, just before the pavement ends and the road turns to dirt. On the other side of a patch of woods are Melvina Williams, the Conyers' maid, her drunken husband Old Alfonso, and a yard full of kids, mostly boys -- including Lucy's obsession, the wild and handsome Skippy. This is the early sixties. Colored boys cannot go into white poeple's houses. And white girls cannot go into colored people's houses. You have to learn the categories, Lucy understands. Nobody tells you. You figure it out yourself.There is talk of integration. Martin Luthur King and George Wallace loom large on television. Lucy's stepfather likes the world just as it is, and will fight to keep it that way. Her mother is hell-bent on changing it. Sometimes Lucy tries to know what she never can know. Other times she tries not to know what she knows. She certainly knows trouble when she sees it - they all do - but nobody is expecting gunshots on California Street. And nobody can explain why these things have to happen.This is a novel of making promises and struggling to keep them, of unlikely bonds and forbidden ones, of love gone wrong and love everlasting.
language: English
title: Crossing Blood
titlecomplete: Crossing Blood
genres: Fiction
ratings_count: 97
series: Deep South Books
publisher: Putnam Adult