From the time she was a little girl, Edie Lynch has been listening to family stories, starting with her beloved grandmother Josie, where they sat together on an old swing couch on Josie's front porch and Edie learned that Josie was the daughter of a white doctor and her beautiful and ambitious slave mother, Missy.

The doctor came to the plantation one day where Josie and her mother were laboring in the cotton fields of Alabama and he leaned down from his big black horse and handed Josie a pair of little red shoes, declaring that the shoes were from her Pa. The doctor and Missy's...