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Tag: African American main character

Tumbling, by Diane McKinney-Whetstone

Tumbling, by Diane McKinney-Whetstone

Diane McKinney-Whetstone is the acclaimed author of six novels, the first of which is Tumbling, first published in 1996. The story, which takes place in Philadelphia in the 1940s and 1950s, focuses on Noon, her husband Herbie, and their two adopted children. But their lives are so intertwined with other community members that the novel is really about the entire neighborhood of African-Americans. There are so many things I like about this novel, from the engaging story lines to the…

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Sapphira and the Slave Girl, by Willa Cather

Sapphira and the Slave Girl, by Willa Cather

Sapphira and the Slave Girl is Willa Cather’s last novel, published in 1940. It takes place in 1856 in Back Creek, Virginia. Cather was born in Back Creek in 1873 and lived there for nine years, before moving with her family to Nebraska (the setting of some of her more famous books, such as My Antonia). Sapphira and the Slave Girl was inspired by stories that Cather heard in her childhood. When Sapphira Colbert married and moved from Winchester to…

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Wench, by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

Wench, by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

Wench tells of four women slaves who travel with their masters each summer to Tawawa House, a resort in Ohio, a free state. For the women, it is a working vacation, where they have enough leisure to swim in the hot springs and take occasional short trips. Yet even as they are dressed prettily for a special dinner-dance with their masters, they cannot forget that they are slaves, each compelled to share her master’s bed and bear his children. The…

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Cane River, by Lalita Tademy

Cane River, by Lalita Tademy

The novel Cane River is so closely based on Lalita Tademy’s ancestors that she includes family photographs, documents, and newspaper clippings. In 1995, Tademy quit her job as a vice president of Sun Microsystems so she could research her family’s history and write a novel. Cane River was published in 2001. Tademy starts her novel with the story of a woman seven generations removed from herself: Elisabeth, a slave in the early 1800’s on a plantation along Cane River in…

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The Color Purple, by Alice Walker

The Color Purple, by Alice Walker

First published in 1982, The Color Purple turns 35 this year (2017). The novel won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and was made into an award-winning movie in 1985. The photo above is from the cover of her biography, Alice Walker: A Life. The time and place of this novel are obscure at first, because the narrator is an uneducated young woman who doesn’t supply this information. The details of her life give us clues: this…

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Beloved, by Toni Morrison

Beloved, by Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988, was inspired by the story of escaped slave Margaret Garner, who killed her own child when she and her family were about to be recaptured by slave-hunters. In an interview in the New York Times, Morrison says that while she became fascinated by Garner’s story, she also wanted to be free to create the character herself. ”Now I didn’t do any more research at all about that story. I…

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property valerie martin
Property, by Valerie Martin

Property, by Valerie Martin

The title of this short novel could be read in multiple ways: “property” refers to the slave, Sarah, owned by the main character, a white woman named Manon. It could also refer to Manon herself, who is in a way the “property” of her husband. When Manon inherits her mother’s house, it is by law her husband’s property, since she “belongs” to him. Property was first published in 2003 and won the Orange Prize for Fiction by a female author…

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Jubilee, by Margaret Walker

Jubilee, by Margaret Walker

If you are looking for a non-racist alternative to Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, here it is: Jubilee. Written by an African-American woman and first published in 1966, Jubilee is a fictionalized account of the author’s great-grandmother’s experiences before, during, and after the Civil War. The photo above shows Walker’s great-grandmother, the “Vyry” of the novel. She took after her white slave-owner father in the color of her skin. I found this photo on the U Space Gallery web site….

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Tituba Black Witch Salem Maryse Conde
I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem by Maryse Condé

I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem by Maryse Condé

Maryse Condé, a writer of African-Caribbean heritage, expands on the story of Tituba, the black slave from Barbados accused of witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692. In an interview printed at the back of the book, Condé reveals that she learned about Tituba by accident when she got lost in a library. She became curious, and sought more facts about her life. Finding very little, Condé says “I decided I was going to write her story out of my own…

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Kindred cover image
Kindred, by Octavia Butler

Kindred, by Octavia Butler

Octavia Butler is best known as a science fiction writer—one of the few African American women science fiction writers, and the first science fiction writer to receive a “genius” grant from the MacArthur Foundation. However, she has written at least one book which combines historical fiction with time travel. Kindred was a best-seller when it was first published in 1979, and is still taught in schools and colleges today. I can easily understand why. It is an absolutely gripping novel:…

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