It's the summer of 1968 - the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., was recently assassinated, Nixon is about to become president, and 12-year-old Mildred Juniper Rhodes is in a quandary. Her daddy got a wild hair to move to Piedmont Ridge, S.C., to pastor a church filled with coloreds and whites - which isn't making much of anybody happy.When the town's crazy widow, a dairy farmer, becomes one of Mildred's only friends, Mildred realizes that things are bad. Add to that having to go to church in a run-down Bingo Hall, facing flaming threats of violence in her own front yard, and a run-in with a...