Three Red Suitcases: A Southern Childhood

When adult Levonne Gaddy returns to the rural North Carolina community, where she was born and raised, to attend her mother’s funeral, the director bars her entry to the viewing room, assuming she is white and therefore not related to the colored woman in the coffin. A sad, funny, and poignant story of childhood emerges as memories surface of racism and of the dysfunctional family life she left behind. Turmoil during the 1960’s racial integration of southern schools fill her mind, as do the challenges of her first job, at age eleven, as the live-in caregiver for an elderly white woman. How will she come to terms with a childhood that includes rape and the death of her father? How will she make peace with the loss of the woman who gave birth to her but with whom she always struggled to make a connection?