Adult - Black Experience

When Elizabeth Balsam is asked to deliver a box of old photos to a relative she didn't know she had, she begins a journey of discovery about her family, including two remarkable women who embodied courage and love in the face of war, racism, and persecution.

"The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it's not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it's everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Ten years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other secretly passes for white, and...

"In 2025 California, an eighteen-year-old African American woman, suffering from a hereditary trait that causes her to feel others' pain as well as her own, flees northward from her small community and its desperate savages." --

"Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage--and lost his mother and all memory of her when he was a child--but he is also gifted with a mysterious power. Hiram almost drowns when he crashes a carriage into a river, but is saved from the depths by a force he doesn't understand, a blue light that lifts him up and lands him a mile away. This strange brush with death forces a new urgency on Hiram's private rebellion. Spurred on by his improvised plantation...

"A ferociously talented writer makes his stunning debut with this richly woven tapestry, set in a small Nova Scotia town settled by former slaves, that depicts several generations of one family bound together and torn apart by blood, faith, time, and fate. Structured as a triptych, Africaville chronicles the lives of three generations of the Sebolt family--Kath Ella, her son Omar/Etienne, and her grandson Warner--whose lives unfold against the tumultuous...

Fearless, funny, and ultimately tender, Evans's stories offer a bold new perspective on the experience of being young and African-American or mixed-race in modern-day America.

The Butler family has had their share of trials?as sisters Althea, Viola, and Lillian can attest?but nothing prepared them for the literal trial that will upend their lives. Althea, the eldest sister and substitute matriarch, is a force to be reckoned with and her younger sisters have alternately appreciated and chafed at her strong will. They are as stunned as the rest of the small community when she and her husband Proctor are arrested, and in...

Janie Crawford, a Southern Black woman in the 1930's, journeys from being a free-spirited girl to a woman of independence and substance.

Letitia holds nothing more dear than the papers that prove she is no longer a slave. Nancy Hawkins is loathe to leave her settled life for the treacherous journey by wagon train, but she will follow her husband anywhere. Betsy is a Kalapuya Indian, the last remnant of a once proud tribe in the Willamette Valley in Oregon territory. As season turns to season, suspicion turns to friendship, and fear turns to courage, three spirited women will discover...

"In September 1969, a fumbling, cranky old church deacon known as Sportcoat shuffles into the courtyard of the Cause Houses housing project in south Brooklyn, pulls a .45 from his pocket, and in front of everybody shoots the project's drug dealer at point-blank range. The reasons for this desperate burst of violence and the consequences that spring from it lie at the heart of Deacon King Kong, James McBride's funny, moving novel and his first since...