Seventeen-year-old Grace danced in an endless circle of uncertainty, trapped between her sheltered childhood and life as an adult. 

Her grandfather and his only son built her two-story slat board house long before Grace was ever thought of, and its thick, insulated walls and long oak beams were sure to survive long after her memory of them faded. An old sign advertising horse shoeing hung from a rusty post out front of the home, the only remaining relic of a pre-depression business owned by her family.

But by this time there weren't any horses in town. There were many heads of sheep and cattle, and the rough roads leading out of town were often overrun with chickens, but the last horse had long been gone from Hinklesburg, West Virginia. Now Chevrolets and Fords fought with trains and miners and lost lunch wrappings for space on the narrow streets. 

Post-war America was prospering, wallowing in the glory of the years between WWII and the beginning of the Cold War. Grace's rural mining town, however, was in a precarious position. Its mines were running short of the simple black rock that built it.

Grace, too, sat on the edge of change -- forced to learn the difference in fate and desire, education and intelligence, youth and maturity, and ultimately, to face the impossible gray abyss between black and white.