She slowed down, thinking she should get a good look at the little town that would be the subject of her mural. When she’d viewed Edenton in the atlas, it had been a watery-looking place, nothing more than a speck surrounded by a bay and a river. Even on the map, it had looked strangely foreign to her, and she’d closed the atlas with a worried sigh.

She hadn’t expected to win the competition, and the timing could not have been worse. She’d just buried her mother. Her best friend. The one person in the world whose love and nurturing Anna could always count on. But she couldn’t turn down work, not with jobs so impossible to find. Not when her mother was no longer around to bring in the sewing money that had paid for their food and expenses. No, she needed to be grateful for this opportunity, even if it meant she had to travel more than four hundred miles to “become familiar with the geographic area” she was to immortalize in the mural.

She’d never had any yearning to travel south of the Mason-Dixon line, and she was glad she’d only be here for a few days. The South seemed so backward to her. Segregated schools and ridiculous laws about keeping colored and white apart on buses and at water fountains and in restrooms. She’d had a few colored classmates at Plainfield High School and she’d counted a couple of the girls as friends. They’d been on the basketball team and in glee club together.

“You’re looking at Plainfield through rose-colored glasses,” her mother would have said. Even in Plainfield, those colored girls Anna thought of as her friends couldn’t go into certain shops or restaurants with her, and one of them told her they had to sit in the balcony at the Paramount Theater. The roller rink had a “colored night” set aside for them each week and they—as well as Anna’s Jewish friends—were unwelcome at the country club. But still, everyone knew it was worse in the South. They actually lynched Negroes in the south.