Kai Thomas’s debut, IN THE UPPER COUNTRY (334 pp., Viking, $28), is a fresh and propulsive novel, set in 1859 in the all-Black Canadian town of Dunmore, a hub on the Underground Railroad. The town serves as safe haven and utopia both, hacked into the swampland by those seeking freedom.
The novel follows Lensinda Martin, a biracial Black woman, born free and taught to read and write, who has come to Dunmore from the north, unlike most of the town’s inhabitants, who arrived after fleeing slavery in the United States. Lensinda (or Sinda, as she’s called) keeps house and also writes articles for her employer’s newspaper, The Coloured Canadian.
When she’s called to assist a strange white man who’s been shot, Sinda assumes she’s needed for her skill with medicinal herbs, but it soon becomes clear that her words will be the poultice needed for a wound with the potential to fester. A slave catcher has been killed by a Black woman, Cash, he was set on capturing, and Sinda and the people of Dunmore understand that in the wake of this murder of self-defense “a story must be told; some sense must be made. For in the absence of sense, fear and violence would reign.”
Sinda, blunt and aloof, is tasked with interviewing Cash in order to write a story that will sway hearts and minds, but she finds her match in the recalcitrant old woman, who couldn’t care less what people think of her.
Unwilling to share her traumas without recompense, Cash initiates a barter: a tale for a tale. Thomas makes superb use of this framework, with the stories building upon one another until they reach a surprising and satisfying conclusion. What initially seemed like the capricious whim of an elderly woman leads to intermingling revelations about Sinda, Cash, Dunmore and the often overlooked histories of Black and Indigenous Canadians.
Thomas uses evocative detail and immersive description to explore slavery in Canada, a country that has been mythologized as an escape from the institution. As one character laments, “the land of one man’s freedom would always be the land of another’s bondage.” He also deftly makes clear the interconnectedness and rippling traumas it caused from Africa to the Caribbean to the Americas.
Like Sinda’s finished article, Thomas’s work is a testament to the power of story and a veneration of those whose tales are often forgotten in mainstream media.
MOONRISE OVER NEW JESSUP (324 pp., Algonquin, $28), Jamila Minnicks’s impressive PEN/Bellwether Prize-winning debut novel, transports readers to 1957, to the all-Black town of New Jessup, Ala. Alice Young is running from her rural hometown after defending herself against an attempted assault by her white landlord. Her sister, Rosie, moved to Chicago years ago in search of a better life, and Alice intends to join her, but a pit stop in New Jessup changes everything. “Up and down the avenue, Negroes of every shade came together like the dusk in a fall forest.” The realization that a town where Black people live freely, without the indignities of Jim Crow, brings Alice to tears. She decides to stay a while.
Alice is welcomed by the pastor and his wife, picks up jobs as a seamstress and a waitress and begins a romance with Raymond Campbell, a son of one of the town’s founding families. The story’s driving conflict is most firmly introduced through Alice’s shock and betrayal at discovering that Raymond is secretly involved with the National Negro Advancement Society. New Jessup isn’t free from the specter of white violence — like many Black enclaves, it’s in a tense but stable détente with the white side of town — but things are calm so long as everyone knows their place and agitators are given no quarter. Raymond’s involvement with the equal rights movement threatens that peace.
Modern readers used to tales of the glory of the civil rights movement may be confused by Alice’s surprise and anger, but Minnicks sensitively explores the fact that desegregation wasn’t welcomed by all Black people. Many believed the fight could upset the hard-won, though limited, freedoms already gained by some Black communities, and could invite white violence.
This is in many ways a quiet novel, and Minnicks’s writing is at its best when detailing the small, human interactions that mark Alice’s transition from country girl to Campbell matriarch. The novel delves smartly into the distinction between the fight for equal rights and the fight for integration, though Alice’s focus on those she cares for short changes her own internal growth arc. However, through Alice, Minnicks provides a nuanced and realistic portrayal of the personal costs of fighting for change.
Nyani Nkrumah’s ambitious debut novel, WADE IN THE WATER (310 pp., Amistad, $27.99), is a historical coming-of-age tale set in 1982. The story follows Ella, a 12-year-old girl living in Ricksville, Miss., a segregated town still haunted by, and determined not to repeat, the anti-civil-rights violence of two decades earlier. Ella has very dark skin and jarringly describes herself as “dark as an oil spill, looking like a cuckoo in their nest,” compared with the rest of her family who are “so pale they could almost pass for white.” The product of an affair between her mother and an unknown man, Ella — intelligent, sensitive and naïve — becomes the family scapegoat, either ignored or terribly abused by her mother and stepfather.
Ella’s life changes when Miss Katherine St. James, a middle-aged white graduate student from Princeton, arrives in Ricksville to interview locals about the legacy of the civil rights movement. She rents a home on the Black side of town, drawing curious Ella’s attention and leading to the formation of a toxic bond between the two. Katherine finds in Ella a way to insinuate herself into a community that sees her presence as a threat, and Ella finds in Katherine the validation she so desperately seeks. As Ella’s friends, family and community reject Katherine, the girl grows ever more desperate to defend a woman she doesn’t know, causing her to make decisions that put herself and others in danger.
The novel works best as a bildungsroman, with Nkrumah elevating a young girl’s struggles with intense colorism, the traumas of abuse and betrayal and her eventual ability to love herself. However, as an exploration of racial strife in the American South, the novel has its shortcomings. There is a heavy-handed epistolary subplot detailing a young white girl’s induction into white supremacy, and issues that require a modicum of closure for the reader — such as physical and sexual abuse, recountings of traumatic racial violence and the harm Ella causes in her community in defense of Miss St. James — aren’t adequately addressed by the denouement or accounted for by Ella’s personal growth.
While this book does touch on important topics, like colorism in the Black community, as well as the parasitic nature of white supremacy, the novel doesn’t quite carry the load of the heavier elements in the story.
Alyssa Cole writes romance novels and thrillers. Her most recent book is “How to Find a Princess.”
