Dear Reader,

Just yesterday, in conversation with a renowned author, I was reminded that a reader must be prepared for the story. This is no easy task. Most of all because of my own preferences and frankly, I’m not sure that I have any idea about how to prepare a reader. My love of reading is broad and indistinct. In other words, I’ll read anything, particularly fiction and the more I know about the content, the less interested I become. Above all, I want to be surprised and I want to learn and while I’m on the excavation, the excavation of reading, I’ll go wherever the author takes me. That is the point! When I read and when I write – the world exists only in fragments, the ones necessary to the story. If you’re anything like me, stop reading here!

Yet, I’m conceding and attempting this preparation because we all have different reasons for reading. One hope is for empathy but is empathy truly what we are seeking when we crack the first pages of a book or is it simply an amazing byproduct of the experience. Either way, it is invaluable. 

So Dear Reader, this book began as a meditation on the history of African Americans in the United States. Not the more common history known by all, but the real and undocumented history that is not so well known. Frankly, in this United States, it makes no sense to think of a story intended for a white or black audience or race as anything other than an individual construct because we are inexorably and intrinsically linked as a culture and a people. Like it or not. So, this story is for and about all of us. Maybe the reason that it resists a genre such as family saga or historical fiction is because it treads outside the lines of both genres. But it is indeed the story of a family and some of it takes place, long ago. 

Often enough, I wonder why we aren’t all crazy. And I wonder how we manage to so skillfully disconnect ourselves from the miasma that we are subjected to in our day-to-day reality. I resist the world or try to.

I also wonder at the power and longevity of cruelty. Why it holds such sway and what are the aftereffects; the invisible things that clearly result from the way we have treated others and been mistreated by others. Unkindness almost seems like a human default, invisible because of its ubiquity, like a virus. We’re not hunting the cure because we don’t know we’re ill. This story, in whichever category you place it, is in no small way about resistance. And I’m being coy here, because I hate the idea of giving away too much and ruining your surprises. But these characters are all attempting to rid themselves of the world in the way they know it. 

Mother is suffering from a condition that didn’t even have a name that she knew and that she inherited from her great grandmother. Fortunately, they believe in healing.
READ ON…