Award-winning author of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf and her sister, award-winning playwright of The Ballad of Emmett Till, achieve nothing less than a modern classic with this epic, universal story of the Mayfield family. Opening dramatically at a sprawling rice plantation just off Georgia's coast, the recently emancipated Elizabeth Mayfield says her goodbyes to Sea Island before fleeing for the prospect of a free life in Charleston. With her granddaughter, Eudora, in tow, she will carve out lives for them in the bustling port city as a seamstress and fortune-teller. Ma Bette, as she is later called, becomes matriarch and fierce protector as she shapes, supports, and leads her children and theirs through trials unimaginable. Eudora will marry; the Mayfield line will grow; and, readers will be taken on an astonishing tour through the watershed events of American history as experienced by one incredibly strong and musically-gifted family. From Reconstruction to both World Wars, from the Harlem Renaissance to Vietnam, Some Sing, Some Cry brings to life a monumental story of one family's history and of America's history, of the warmth of home and the shatter of heartbreak, of an unforgettable past and a brighter future, blazing ahead.