It’s the summer of 1958 and Mrs. Sarah Woods has been visiting colored families in a small rural North Carolina community. Armed with her North Carolina Eugenics Board questionnaire, she has been doling out sterilization orders to families of the afflicted, feebleminded, and genetically undesired. The targeted households, already ashamed of having imperfect children and impaired family members, keep their new misery a tightly held secret. Cora Lee Burden is the latest to receive an appointment notice from Mrs. Woods. The sixty-four-year-old grandmother of a mentally challenged child has no idea what a white social worker from the government would want with her family. Being a colored woman of the south she knows the visit is a call for caution.