Swan

No one ever called Delia Dukes by her real name. Instead, they called her Duck, because, as everyone said, she was the ugly one. Her older sister, Merline, was the perfect one - beautiful, precocious, well mannered. Merline was the pride of Greenville, Texas's Negro community, and Duck was just her unfortunate-looking younger sister. But Duck was smarter than anyone expected, and, growing up in her small, segregated town in the 1930s and 1940s, she knew secrets. In fact, she knew the biggest secret of all: the fact that her seventeen-year-old sister was pregnant by Greenville's heir apparent, Kenny Banks. When she was seventeen, Duck took her secrets to Chicago, where she cleaned jazz clubs and dreamed about singing on stages instead of cleaning them. By 1960, Duck was known on the Chicago jazz scene as Delia Dukes, a middling singer who didn't quite have what it took to play the Blue Note, but who did quite well in the city's second-tier clubs. By 1970, Duck and Merline's mother died, and, for the first time in twenty years, Duck and Merline were reunited. Swan is the story of Delia "Duck" Dukes, a girl who escapes her small Texas town in the 1940s and 1950s, seeking to shed her reputation for being the ugly duckling in her family and escape an abusive stepfather. Although she moves to Chicago and pursues her goal of being a singer, she cannot seem to cut the ties to her inattentive mother and pretty, mean-spirited sister Merline. The novel follows Duck and Merline's lives as they take very different paths into adulthood. Merline works as a maid and raises a biracial daughter who eventually begins passing as white, and Duck finds success as a singer but fails at finding love. When their mother dies, Duck and Merline reunite for the first time in nearly thirty years, trying to find common ground between sisters whose lives have been so different.