Summary

In Chapter 1, it is late fall, 1955. Rose Zimmer, who works at Real’s Radish and Pickle, worships Abraham Lincoln, and who is a resident of Sunnyside Gardens, is told by her fellow Communists, including Sol Eaglin, that she needs to stop seeing her black cop boyfriend. A select committee headed up by Sol confronts her in her home over this. Rose does her best to be patient, as most of them are too young to remember life in the 1930s. Rose finds it hypocritical that her fellow Communists should want to bring revolution to blacks, but not allow her to sleep with a black man. Rose’s daughter, fifteen year-old Miriam, has gone to her grandmother (Rose’s ex-mother-in-law), Alma’s, in the Knickerbocker Apartments in Manhattan, for the evening. Miriam’s father, Albert, has abandoned the family to serve the...