When I Get Home, Houston-born Solange’s 2019 album, is an ode to “a kind of Houston of the mind”—grounded yet ephemeral, breezy yet intentional, capacious and Black-owned. “I saw things I imagined,” she sings. For Solange, as it is for many of the Black folks who call the Bayou City home, Houston is a community where someone sets a place for you, no matter how long you’ve been gone. It’s a city where in the face of gentrification, redlining, and the afterlife of chattel slavery, you can see things you imagine.
Too often, mass media paints the story of Black girl magic as the story of the individual. The first-generation student who beat the odds, the basketball star who worked his way out. Less attention is given to the environments that make those people possible; the grandmamas and mamas cooking gumbo, watching somebody else’s kids, braiding hair on the stoop first thing on a Saturday morning. This is the world of Houstonian J. Elle’s debut novel Wings of Ebony. Although the novel’s literal magic lies in the fictional land of Ghizon, Black girls from Houston are depicted as they have always been—alchemical, making a way out of no way.
The book follows 17-year-old Rue as she reels from her mother’s murder in Houston’s fictional East Row. Shortly after her mother dies, Aasim, Rue’s previously absent father, returns to reveal that she is a demigod of the land of Ghizon. Against her will, he separates Rue from her 12-year-old sister, Tasha, and takes her to Ghizon, immersing her in the world of magic that is her birthright. But Rue’s very existence as half-human is a crime in Ghizon, and she struggles to fit in. On the anniversary of her mother’s death, Rue sneaks back to Houston to check on Tasha and narrowly saves her from a car accident. There, Rue discovers that a gang connected to the stranger who caused the accident has unleashed unprecedented destruction in East Row; Rue must use her newly found magic to protect her community from racist violence that may change her homes in both Houston and Ghizon forever.
