Parties Unknown

70 years after a group of white men seized a black farmhand from a jail in a small Maryland town, dragged him in front of more than 1,000 cheering onlookers, hanged him, and burned his corpse on the courthouse lawn, the lynching continues to change and threaten the lives of two families. Hasty Tyler leaves Washington, D.C. to become a small-town lawyer and live on the farm once owned by his grandparents. He learns the details of the 1934 lynching, and his connection to it, from three women with different perspectives: family friend and retired history teacher Elsie Long; his paralegal, a beautiful young black woman named Bethesda Tazewell; and Bethesda's grandmother Nettie, who was 12 years old and living with her family on the Tyler farm when the lynching occurred. The lingering racial tension generated by the lynching leads to a tragic confrontation involving Hasty, his cousin and Cromwell police chief Carter Rowley, and Bethesda’s bitter younger brother Bevan.