Why has their grandmother bothered keeping a menu from a restaurant that closed years ago, a restaurant that never served very good food in the first place? Three cousins listen to Gee's own story, set in the early days of lunch counter sit-ins in Nashville, a time when a black child could sit up front in a city bus but still could not get a milkshake at a downtown restaurant. Through the eyes of ten-year-old Abby, young readers see what it was like to live through those days and they'll come to understand that, like a menu, freedom is about having choices.

Each book in the series tells the story behind a different ‘scrap of time;' together they form a patchwork quilt of one black family's past that stretches back for generations.