This book is the first of three on the racism, the delusion, the love, the hatred, the violence, the hope, the meanness and generosity, the humanity and inhumanity, the range of love-hate viciousness and nobility that bind the black and the white people of the United States into the same nation. The second book will be gray and the third will be black, but this first is the white novel. It begins with a love story among the very young at a time when black Americans, eighty years after freedom, were still in bondage. Some say they are in bondage even now, but not like then.