Race, skin color, with all its complex layers of dissension and entanglement, is embedded in the social fabric of America. For more than two centuries we have struggled between embracing it without scruples and condemning its inhumanity. We have used it for profit; ugly guilt of our misfortunes; they sacrificed each other for the right to enslave and passed on their prejudices from generation to generation. It is so ingrained in our spirit that race has become synonymous with the word “America.” Even now, at the dawn of the 21st century, we cannot let go of our racial ties.

This true story, One Day She’ll Darken, is not about America as seen from the outside, but about America from within, from within a child who saw things differently.

It begins in the early 1950s in San Francisco, before Fauna Hodel was born. The 16-year-old daughter of a prominent white California family became pregnant and insisted the father was “black.” Outraged by their daughter’s audacity and the stigma attached to a mixed-race child among them, the family quickly arranged for the baby to be adopted by someone so far removed from their social footprints that even the shadows disappeared.

Jimmie Lee Stokes, a simple black maid who works in a Nevada casino, and her common law husband, Chris Greenwade, reluctantly agree to become the recipients of this new life, as “all the arrangements have been made.” They quickly travel to San Francisco to retrieve the baby from the hospital and discover that the unwanted mulatto girl is a pinkish white with blue eyes, not what they expected as the progeny of an African American father and Caucasian mother. However, the birth certificate clearly states that the father is “black.”

Chris convinces Jimmie to accept this “angel of God”. Soon, however, she is filled with resentment and is overwhelmed by the problems of raising a white-skinned baby in her black community. Jimmie starts drinking heavily and her husband quickly abandons her. Alone, poor and black, she is forced to do tricks to support her baby. The black woman and her white son spend the next twenty years battling extreme poverty, alcoholism, sexual abuse, pregnancy, marriage, and death, all bound together and knotted by unrelenting prejudice.

The only world Fauna knew when she grew up was one she did not belong to. She was a white-skinned girl in a black world with only her birth certificate to confirm her authenticity. Racism on both sides dominated his life, but not his spirit. His only salvation was finding the truth about his mixed race from the only person he knew for sure, his biological mother, Tamar, the woman of his dreams.

Fauna set out to discover the story that created this strange life and the reason why it was delivered. Their search ends abruptly with a phone call from Tamar informing Fauna that her real father was not “black” at all. Having spent her life defending her African American roots, Fauna is traumatized. Your life has been a lie and now you need to know why.

Her journey takes her from the waters of Reno to the island of Oahu, where she finally meets Tamar, who explains her decision to have her first child raised by blacks. “In my little world, I believed that blacks were made of far superior stuff than the whites I knew. I was ashamed to be white.”

Dissatisfied with such a simple answer, Fauna investigates further. Tamar reveals the secrets of her rich, powerful and darkly mysterious family and a story so incredible it makes Fauna’s own history pale in comparison. She discovers that her grandfather was involved in a sensational incest trial that may have resulted in her own birth and the murder and maiming of numerous young women, including the now infamous case of The Black Dahlia.

Meanwhile, Jimmie’s health is failing; She cannot let Fauna go, not for her real mother, not for Fauna’s new husband. Forced to choose, Fauna returns to Jimmie. In the last hours, before the old woman dies, both discover that the knots that united them grew in their hearts and could not be undone with ignorance, prejudice or hatred.

One Day She’ll Darken is a story about how to conquer bigotry with unconditional love, a love that has no limits, a love that is color blind.