Lavina traverses the near present, in the 1990's and the segregated South of the 1960's. It is the story of Mary Jacob, a children's book author who has virtually no memory of her early life. Billy Ray, Lavina's son and a musical genius, remembers all too well what happened to them on a hot August day in 1963 when their lives changed forever. When the two of them meet again in their hometown, it propels them back to their childhoods. In the second part of the novel, Lavina herself speaks. She is uneducated, but a woman of great mind and heart, who put her life on the line, not because she was so brave, not because she had political aspirations, but for the simple reason that she believed in God and wanted the world to be better for her son. She wanted to do the right thing.