New York Times Bestseller. When Hattie baptized her firstborn twins, Philadelphia and Jubilee, it was an expression of great hope. Hadn't the North, the "Cradle of Freedom," promised equality and prosperity to the Black people coming from the South? And didn't life in the small house on Wayne Street taste of the future? Hattie will have many more children, but hardly any of her hopes will come to fruition. Pain from failures and misfortunes overshadows Hattie's existence. It is a pain that will carry over into the next generation. Yet this saga of an extraordinary woman and her twelve children, which begins as a story of the Great Migration and expands into a tableau with twelve individual portraits throughout the twentieth century, is despite its failures and disappointments a vital epic - full of life and resilience.