Nancy Peacock has created a drama of two families - one black, one white - and the house that binds their lives for more than a hundred years.<BR>In 1861, Roseberry was the plantation home of the white Redds; the black Redds were one of the slave families who worked on the place. In 1971, Roseberry stands empty, a wisteria vine growing through the dining room window, and China Redd, who worked in the house for half a century, is ready to die.<BR>But first she has a story to tell. Not the one recorded by Lydia Redd, the matron of the house, in her own book The Legends of Roseberry. No, China will set the record straight, beginning with the earrings, the selling of Cleavis, and the curse, and ending with the death of Coyle, the last of the white Redds. If she has nothing else from forty-seven years of work in a house in which nothing was her own, she has this story.