The Mark by Beth Bentley Perry

Samantha O’Shea, known as Sammy, was left with a black wet-nurse as a newborn by her white mother just before the Wall Street bust that started the Great Depression. This is a continuation of her life after graduation from high school and is the sequel to “Does God Wear A Black Mask?” She graduated from Wesleyan College, and continued on to Columbia School of Law in New York City to earn a degree in corporate law. In New York City she attended a party and happened to attract the attention of the owner of a fashion modeling firm who hired her to model part-time, which helped pay her expenses. The story takes her through law school and her treatment as the only female in her class in the late 1940s, to her taste of the upper-crust of New York society through a beau from a wealthy family who eventually finds out her past of being reared by black parents until the age of eleven while hidden back in the Okefenokee Swamp under Jim Crow’s shadow. The beau’s attitude toward her suddenly changes from respect to abusive, hateful bigotry.  Unknown by her, a young Naval officer, Sean O’Keefe, whom she met through her second foster father, obsessively looked for her after the war ended. Through her adventurous years of work and travel they continually missed each other by a hair, although he eventually found her. Their engagement was then broken by a deep, dark family secret that sent Sammy on the run. This is a southern genre’ fictional novel that will keep you turning the pages.