Daddy's Gone a-Hunting

In the late 1930s, America is emerging from the Great Depression, but all over the Deep South the Jim Crow laws continue to divide white from black. Interracial marriage -- usually classed a crime -- pushes the children of such mixed blood to make hard choices. Some end masking their real identities.

New Orleans nightclub owner Wesley Farrell "passes" for white. His secret is dangerous, and his protective coloration fragile, leading him to draw a line between himself and people who are unmistakably black. It makes his life complicated -- and lonely. His strong affection for Savanna Beaulieu creates a dilemma: to marry a black woman would blow his cover.

Central to the drama is the concept of family in all its permutations, but especially those of parent and child. With consummate irony, Skinner starts his hero, and his major villain, on the same pitch -- both sons of white fathers and of Creole mothers who die young. Daddy's Gone a Hunting is aptly titled.