The socialist, historian and civil rights activist WEB Du Bois wrote in a 1903 essay titled The Talented Tenth: “The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men.” Though he isn’t a character in this ambitious debut novel by award-winning US poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, his spirited thinking about the important role of classical education in the fight for Black liberation pervades the book. It’s an expansive tale cataloguing the journey of one African American family across centuries, from slavery to the antebellum south and from civil war to present times.
The novel starts with a family tree. We’re first introduced to Micco Cornell, the son of a Scottish man and a woman from a Native American tribe known as the Creek people, who also has African ancestry. In the late 18th century, when Cornell inherits a village from his father, he signs it over to a white man called Samuel Pinchard in case his African heritage is one day exposed. The deal is done with the promise that Pinchard will peacefully run the farm and eventually marry Cornell’s daughter, but it isn’t long before he turns brutal, buying slaves and committing endless atrocities. That’s when we learn about Aggie, who is brought from Africa and sold to Pinchard. “Tears and sleep were not luxuries cast to slaves. There was only work,” writes Jeffers. But soon, Aggie becomes an energising force intent on destabilising Pinchard’s sadistic reign.
