Belonging to the Air

Honest "Bird" Bennett is a young Black girl with a hunger to learn what lies beyond the walls she shares with her mother, Maddy, and her grandmother, Odelia. Their home is governed by the hum of Maddy's sewing machine, echoes of Bird preparing supper, and Odelia's stories of times past. The women live in Bennettsville, Illinois, a freedmen's town established by Bird's great-grandfather, where rural life pulses with church song and where peace is fragile with the neighboring white town, Tuckersvi