William Melvin Kelley 
Drop of Patience [EPUB ebook] 

At the age of five, a blind African-American boy is handed over to a brutal state home. Here Ludlow Washington will suffer for eleven years, until his prodigious musical talent provides him an unlikely ticket back into the world.The property of a band, playing for down-and-outs in a southern dive, Ludlow’s pioneering flair will take him to New York and the very top of the jazz scene — where his personal demons will threaten to drag him back down to the bottom.A Drop of Patience is the story of a gifted and damaged man entirely set apart — by blindness, by race, by talent — who must wrestle with adversity and ambition to generate the acceptance and self-worth that have always eluded him.