Because It is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart

In the early 1950s— the decade before the Civil rights movement— racial boundaries kept people apart or brought them together in explosive and dramatic ways. Iris Courtney, a young white woman, begins a clandestine relationship with Jinx Fairchild, a Black man who defended her in a fatal street fight with a white man. That one act changes their lives overnight, altering their destinies in ways they could never have imagined in this emotion-packed novel of violence, love, and racism.