Mags Preacher, a young black woman with a dream, arrives in St. Louis from the piney woods of her family home in 1916. She knows nothing about Jews except they killed the Lord Jesus Christ. Then she begins working for Mr. Fishbein, and Eastern European emigre who fled the pogroms that shattered his life to become the proprieteor of Fishbein's Funeral Home. By the time he saves Mags from certain death during the 1917 race riots in East S. Louis, all her perceptions have changed. But there is something dangerous about Mr. Fishbein's daughter, the red-headed beauty Minerva. And it is Magnus Bailey, Mags' first friend in the city, who learns to what heights and depths the girl's willful spirit can drive a man. From the brutal riots of East St. Louis to Memphis, Tennessee, during the 1920's and the Depression, Marching to Zion is the tragic story of Minerva and Magnus during an era in America when interracial love could not go unpunished.