It’s 1973 in the small East Texas town of Conifer. Segregation’s finally dead, but the corpse is still warm. Turk Yancy, a ninety-year-old Black man, upends local legend by claiming it was his ex-slave father Darus Yancy, and not a local preacher, who built and flew the first airplane years before the Wright Brothers.

Dani Quinn, on the edge of losing her job as the sole female feature reporter for the Dayton Ohio Messenger, is sent to East Texas to investigate Turk’s story. Her editor thinks an old man’s crackpot tale will make a humorous sidebar to the special issue he has planned to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the Wright Brothers’ first flight.

Struggling with federally ordered integration and heated race relations, the last thing locals want is a Yankee reporter nosing around. As Dani peels away the layers of Turk’s story, she must decide. What is most important: the truth, her career, or people’s lives?

STATUS:  Researching and sketching.