In the fall of 1952, the Blackman children were playing in the yard of their home in Rockingham, North Carolina. They were completely unaware that their life as they knew it was about to come to an end. They were about to be lifted out of poverty and hunger. Their mother was too sick to ever come home again. The County Health Department had forced her into a car to be quarantined in Black Mountain, North Carolina, because of tuberculosis. Their father had already rejected them and taken his mistress and her kids to Maryland, never to return again. Soon, the children would take a trip to an orphanage home. There they would each be dropped off at different cottages, never to sleep under the same roof again.