Time and Chance

The summer of 1947 is her private property, bought and paid for by the lonely hope of a writing career, beginning with a no-pay internship with the Charlotte Star-Dispatch. She may go hungry, she may be relegated to the Society news like many another woman who tries to break into the man’s world of newspapering. She may even pick up a summer boyfriend. But above all, she is ready to show them a thing or two about lonely devotion, about the beauty of writing, and about Charlotte’s refusal to recognize the plague of violent racism that, decades after Reconstruction, still roams her streets. But violence begets more violence, and before there is a reckoning, she will find herself compromised and brutally attacked, with blood on her hands and sorrow in her heart. Here is the coming-of-age story of Gabbro, North Carolina’s own irascible, irrepressible newswoman Faye Bynum.