For me, the American story is about “mixedness”—about the ways in which people of various backgrounds and beliefs have come together, oftentimes despite themselves, to make up our modern racial stew. It has been true since the Founding and is all the more so now, even as we, as a society, continue to want to resist it. These novels achieve what I aspire to in my own writing: the white characters are as complex as the Black ones. And in their struggles to make sense of the world, they all reveal the complexity and contradictions of American identity.
Narrated by Manon Gaudet, the mistress of an 1830s plantation outside New Orleans, the novel forced me to adopt the perspective of a person who is both oppressed, as a woman in the 19th century, and oppressor, as a slave-owner, who is keenly observant and stunningly blind. Manon’s body-servant, Sarah, has given birth to a deaf wild-child who Manon cannot ignore, given his striking resemblance to her own husband. Manon, who is obsessed with Sarah too, is incapable of recognizing her as someone being victimized by her husband. She only sees a rival.
I teach Property in my classes. My students hate Manon. They also love the book!
Property is Valerie Martin's powerful, startling novel set in America's deep South in the early nineteenth century: a story of freedom, both political and personal. Manon Gaudet is unhappily married to the owner of a Louisiana sugar plantation. She misses her family and longs for the vibrant lifestyle of her native New Orleans. The tension revolves around Sarah, a slave girl given to Manon as a wedding present from her aunt, whose young son Walter is living proof of where Manon's husband's inclinations lie. This private drama is played out against a brooding atmosphere of slave unrest and bloody uprisings.
I came to Toni Morrison a little late. This was in the 1980s, after she’d won the Pulitzer. I read Song of Solomon first, upon the recommendation of a friend who told me he couldn’t read the end of the novel without bursting into tears. Next, Beloved: I was so awed that I reread it five times in a row!
At that point, I realized that I needed to circle back and start with her first books. The Bluest Eye and Sula both stunned me.
Then came Tar Baby. I immediately understood it to be different from the others.
The novel has significant, primary characters who are white. In the other early novels, white characters might be present, but they are few and very secondary.
Six people live in relative luxury on a Caribbean island. Yet, despite themselves, their racial assumptions inform how they view and treat one another. Tar Baby is an overlooked masterpiece.
A ravishingly beautiful and emotionally incendiary reinvention of the love story by the legendary Nobel Prize winner
Jadine Childs is a Black fashion model with a white patron, a white boyfriend, and a coat made out of ninety perfect sealskins. Son is a Black fugitive who embodies everything she loathes and desires. As Morrison follows their affair, which plays out from the Caribbean to Manhattan and the deep South, she charts all the nuances of obligation and betrayal between Blacks and whites, masters and servants, and men and women.
After her mother is killed in a rare Northern Michigan tornado, Sadie Wixom is left with only her father and grandfather to guide her through young adulthood. Miles away in western Saskatchewan, Stefan Montegrand and his Indigenous family are displaced from their land by multinational energy companies. They are taken…
Toni Morrison once described her books as simple stories about complicated characters, and this also applies to The Known World. This beautifully-written novel, told from the perspective of slave-owners, surprises—but in this case, because they’re Black.
I’d come across an instance of African American slave-owning (which were very few) while researching my first book. Jones understands that the contradictions of the premise offer a great opportunity to explore the fiction of American racial identity.
In The Known World, there are no characters in white hats and others in black hats. The African American characters are no more noble than the white ones.
Masterful, Pulitzer-prize winning literary epic about the painful and complex realities of slave life on a Southern plantation. An utterly original exploration of race, trust and the cruel truths of human nature, this is a landmark in modern American literature.
Henry Townsend, a black farmer, boot maker, and former slave, becomes proprietor of his own plantation - as well as his own slaves. When he dies, his widow, Caldonia, succumbs to profound grief, and things begin to fall apart: slaves take to escaping under the cover of night, and families who had once found love beneath the weight of slavery…
Set in 1940s England and Jamaica, the novel explores racism and colorism, caste and class. Two couples—one British, the other Jamaican—who are living in one house, end up negotiating their biases in post-WWII London. Bring an illegitimate, biracial baby into the mix, and the tensions run high.
While the impact of Jamaica on British identity is the specific subject matter, Small Island reads as an exploration of the blurring—deliberate as well as unexpected—of cultural and racial lines in the US, as well. In this way, Small Island spoke to me about American-ness as much as it revealed to me the story of race in Great Britain.
Plus, the book is wonderfully, intoxicatingly readable!
Hortense shared Gilbert's dream of leaving Jamaica and coming to England to start a better life. But when she at last joins her husband, she is shocked by London's shabbiness and horrified at the way the English live. Even Gilbert is not the man she thought he was. Queenie's neighbours do not approve of her choice of tenants, and neither would her husband, were he there. Through the stories of these people, Small Island explores a point in England's past when the country began to change.
This book (and its sequels) are about overcoming the odds; about learning to improve the skills and abilities you have, rather than dwelling on what you can't do. Conflict, plague, and scheming politicians are all featured along the way–but none of the characters are human!
When I was in college then grad school, everyone was talking about Octavia Butler. Given that I’m not particularly drawn to sci-fi, I ignored the talk. And then I read Kindred. It’s more an exploration of the legacy of slavery than it is a dystopian adventure, though the novel includes time-travel and adventure.
As with the other books on my list, the characters are complex and their dilemmas, seemingly irreconcilable. Set in 1976—significantly, the Bicentennial—the interracial couple at the center of the novel has to combat the attacks and abuses concerning racial mixing—in quite literal ways, as the female protagonist moves back and forth between the present-day and antebellum times, when interracial love was taboo, even as it was quite common, given the power of slave masters over their female slaves.
Sad and triumphant, nuanced and true. These adjectives describe Kindred to a tee.
From the New York Times bestselling author of Parable of the Sower and MacArthur “Genius” Grant, Nebula, and Hugo award winner
The visionary time-travel classic whose Black female hero is pulled through time to face the horrors of American slavery and explores the impacts of racism, sexism, and white supremacy then and now.
“I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm.”
Dana’s torment begins when she suddenly vanishes on her 26th birthday from California, 1976, and is dragged through time to antebellum Maryland to rescue a boy named Rufus, heir to a slaveowner’s plantation. She soon…
By fall 1863, Union forces had established a toehold in eastern North Carolina, including along the Outer Banks. Thousands of runaways flooded the Union lines, but Confederate irregulars still roamed the region. The newly formed African Brigade, a unit of these former slaves led by General Edward Augustus Wild—a one-armed, impassioned Abolitionist—set out to hunt down the rebel guerillas, and also to free the slaves who remained in bondage. For Sergeant Richard Etheridge, the son of a slave and her master, raised with some privileges but constantly reminded of his place, the raid is an opportunity to reunite with Fanny, the woman he hopes to marry one day. It also means an inevitable Cain-and-Abel confrontation between Richard his white half-brother, Patrick.
The Festival of Sin is a three-story light sci-fi arc about a young boy rescued in 6000 BCE and taken to the home planet of the Hudra. Parts two and three are exploratory excursions. It's a fish-out-of-water series. More than fish-out-of-water. Fish-on-another-planet.
I grew up thinking that being adopted didn’t matter. I was wrong. This book is my journey uncovering the significance and true history of adoption practices in America. Now, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, the renewed debate over women’s reproductive rights places…
