Many people do not know about the Chinese laborers who were brought into the South to take the place of the freed slaves. This story takes place in 1890, a few years after that. It illuminates the way that they didn't fit into the white or black world. Jo is an excellent milliner, but is let go because of her race. This forces her back into being a lady's maid, for a girl she has never gotten along with. Jo and Old Gin live illegally in the basement of a printer's barn, an old Underground Railroad housing place. Lee does an excellent job of showing the tightrope Jo had to walk, as well as showing life in the South during Reconstruction. A lovely historical fiction.