What’s a girl to do if she is smart, ambitious, beautiful, and born into a blueblood Boston family of African ancestry?

If you are twenty year old Temple Anne Lovely, the year is 1895, and there is a federal anti-lynching law wending its way through the U.S. Senate, you get yourself crowned Koops and Sons first Afric Maiden and roam southern towns in search of lynch mobs in the name of the cause.

Darker than the underbelly of the moon and newly released from her engagement to one of Negro Boston’s most eligible bachelors and one of its fairest-skinned, Temple is on a mission. Spurred on by Ida B. Wells’ plea to bear witness, broken-hearted, she uses the Afric Maiden beauty contest and its subsequent tour to document acts of mob violence against her people, determined that if she cannot be Price Tillman’s wife then she will be her own woman.

Along the way, she finds love with blue-eyed race man and journalist Truth Sayer, and confronts the scars of her people, which includes a dangerous elitism, madness, and a self-annihilating fascination with light skin.

But the journey is not only Temple’s. Her brother David---fair-skinned like their mother and most of their covey of insular, well-off blacks---suddenly finds himself on a path of self-discovery when he thought he was merely the family chaperone. Lazily apolitical, raised to never question the privilege his nearly white skin affords him or what his beloved sister‘s sable skin costs her, David---once outside of his element---begins to question it all.

Halfway through the tour, the Lovely siblings are stranded in Holly Springs, Mississippi by the white men who have concocted the beauty contest, which is actually a hoax designed to humiliate elite Boston Negroes specifically and Negroes in general. Unaware that they are part of a cruel social experiment, trapped in what the rich, bored men envision as a sort of re-enslavement, Temple and David grapple with personal inner demons and some real ones in the form of Marshall County’s version of the Ku Klux Klan. Brother and sister prevail, but at a loss of life and limb.

A 450 page work of historical fiction, in the tradition of Morrison’s Paradise and Edward P. Jones’s The Known World, beauty is a testament to all the unsung heroes of the past and the present.