Steele Secrets

When Mary Steele mysteriously appears in a long-forgotten cemetery, she finds herself face-to-face with the ghost of an enslaved man, Moses Perkins. As a rather bookish girl who appreciates both Johnny Depp and a good pair of bib overalls, she isn’t really thrown by these odd events and quickly comes to really like Moses and care not only about his story but the existence of this place that most people in her small Virginia town have never even noticed. There’s a research project here, she knows it, and she loves research.
During one of her visits to the graveyard, Mary stands off against a bulldozer that has come to plow under the graves. After she waits out the bulldozer by pretending to read, she undertakes an investigation to find out who wants to destroy the cemetery and why. Her research reveals the existence of a virulent committee of racists led by businessman Maurice Sutton IV, who wants to destroy the cemetery because he hopes to develop the land and is eager to hide his connections to the African American members of town through his ancestor who owned slaves.
At first, Mary jumps with both feet into the work of saving the Sutton cemetery, holding news conferences and planning rallies. But when Sutton’s actions get more violent, she ‘s ready to quit and go back to reading books and watching Tim Burton movies with her mom. But when Moses tells her about the night the master comes to rape his daughter – after having repeatedly raped his wife for years – Mary finds that she simply can’t walk back into her own way of living.
With renewed commitment – and the support of her new (and first) boyfriend Javier – Mary takes Sutton on in public, and Sutton’s black descendants – the results of those rapes – join her in the battle. Soon, Mary learns that she, too, is descended from Sutton and Moses’s wife. Suddenly, her family has grown from just her and her mom to include a whole array of cousins, aunts, and uncles.
It takes some work for Mary to come to terms with her identity as the descendant of slave owner and to understand her family’s history as African Americans, but she comes to embrace all of her story and encourages the townspeople, including Sutton to do the same. While Mary’s efforts do not result in a miraculous change of heart for Sutton or his cronies, she and her friends do save the cemetery, and with many of the town’s harder secrets revealed a bit more light has come to this mountain town.