Red Bone woman

A widower, though completely at home with the views of his community, finds the quiet and loneliness of his farm too much after his wife dies and his children are grown and gone. He brings a girl he's known all her life into his home, a young woman who comes from a third group (neither black or white) but somewhere in between. As his loneliness dissipates, he comes to know and value her as a person. As a personal aside, the book was better served by its hard cover jacket, one of those spare line drawings common in to serious 1950's fiction.