Ida Mae Mays is determined to protect her girls from the hypocrisy of the times and from becoming victims in the best little whore town in Mississippi. Her girls can recite her long list of good girls' rules verbatim about how to conduct themselves around men, especially white men. Johnny Lee Mays supports his wife, but he is a gambling, whiskey making, blues singing man who makes a lot of his money with the men he wants to keep away from his daughters.

Sharon Mays Armstrong's secrets would probably send her parents to an early grave. She plans to take them to hers instead. She refuses to tell her daughter, Erica, who her father is, and to make matters worse, she sleeps around. Her secrets are destroying her relationship with her daughter, and her self-hate is becoming too much for her to bear.

Erica is a green-eyed beauty that already knows her beauty only buys her extra passes for sad love songs. She even gave up her dream to be a singer to follow a sensible path to become a dentist like her Aunt Gina. Love and life are good to the Mays girls when Erica's secret father throws them all a curveball from his grave. Twenty-three years after his wife killed him; James Russell Chesterfield leaves his fortune and a series of love letters to his illegitimate African American daughter and takes her on a roller-coaster ride of self-discovery. Erica's paternity isn't the only secret he will unearth. Russell's wife, his lover, and the sheriff all scramble to prevent a dead man from revealing their secrets and other crimes. Everybody plays the fool sometimes, but can love still prevail?