The author Zora Neale Hurston once joked: “I am the only negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother’s side was not an Indian chief.” In part, Hurston was alluding to the embarrassment some African Americans felt about their “debased” African lineage, a notion that lies at the core of the poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s ambitious debut novel.
Epigraphic reflections on race by WEB Du Bois, a founding father in 1909 of the interracial National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), who proposed that a “talented tenth” (an elite 10% of the African American population) would transform black people’s lowly standing, hover over chapters of the novel. Its breezy yet detailed 800 pages flit between a fable-like backstory of enslaved Africans who forged liaisons with Creek Native Americans (both brutalised by European traders) and a tragic, contemporary family saga of descendants of the enslaved.
