Set in 1959, Betsey Brown tells the story of a black thirteen-year-old as she confronts racial identity and inequality, developing sexuality, and family life in a middle-class African-American neighborhood of St. Louis. The novel opens by introducing the family and describing the rambling Victorian house where they live. The Brown family - including parents Jane and Greer, grandmother Vida, four children, and cousin Charlie - get ready for a day of school and work. Betsey, Jane's oldest and favorite daughter, practices a poem by the famous black poet Paul Laurence Dun-bar for an elocution contest at school. As the chaotic morning ends and the children go off to their all-black school, Vida airs her disapproval of the rising integration movement and cherishes the fact that her family lives in its "own world."

Betsey arrives at school and overhears two girls talking about Eugene Boyd, an older boy...