Choosing Grace

Sky Valentine grows up in Durham, North Carolina, a young Black woman worn down by narrow thinking and the expectations of the South. She leaves for Rhode Island to study at Roger Williams University, where she aims to finish her degree and also let go of the habits that mark her as a Southerner.

Her roommate there is Zenobia, a lively and magnetic woman. Sky falls for her deeply, and the realization confirms something she has sensed for a long time: she is attracted to women. Their relationship is short-lived, though, as Zenobia abruptly leaves the university.

After graduating, Sky goes back to her family in Durham. Her strong-willed mother has arranged for her to marry a wealthy, arrogant man. Her father is kind but passive, and her older brother is content with things as they are. It is 1986, and Sky refuses to accept a life chosen for her. She calls off the wedding and moves to the Bronx, where she has a teaching position and an apartment. There she reconnects with Ola, a childhood friend from Durham, and at a party Ola throws she meets Grace Webster. The attraction between them is immediate, but the relationship is strained by conflict between them, by the obsessive attention of the man she was supposed to marry, and by the pressure to tell her family and friends back home the truth about herself. When Zenobia reappears, Sky must decide whether to complete what she began with Zenobia years earlier or fight for the new relationship she is building with Grace.