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The story is a vivid portrait of Reverend Godbolt's family and his forebears. The family's secrets set the stage for a profound and provocative debate about black identity and destiny in America's past and present. We see the saga of Reverend Godbolt, who has always ruled his family with a steel glove, and who is questioning his faith, near the end of his life. A secret has kept him from truly trusting his wife and even loving one of his children. We see his spirited daughter, Nefertiti, who harbors a secret of her own, which keeps her from being able to actualize as a woman. We have the love triangle of the two men who loved Nefertiti, Pharaoh Curry, her first lover, and Isaac Thorne, her first husband, who both are trying to win her back. This situation is compounded by Nefertiti's current interracial marriage. It was this last act of insurrection against the family's mores which has ex-communicated Nefertiti from her insular family for the seven years preceding her father's seventy-fifth birthday celebration. At the opening of the novel, Nefertiti has returned from Santa Monica, California to Shallow's Corner, Michigan. In her return as the prodigal minister's daughter, the scene is set, as past and present ghosts of hidden sins come home to roost.
Although the kernel of the story takes place from a Wednesday through a Sunday, the story is told out of sequence, in order to reflect the way that the memories of past regrets haunt the characters.
As the formerly owned chattel of white America, there seems to be a propensity among the characters in the novel to own people, places, things, (lucre). In one instance, this is exemplified where the character goes so far as to steal heir property from his brother. Throughout the Godbolt family's struggle for upward mobility, there co-exists the denial of their violent ancestral history, fraught with lynchings, murder and fratricide. The family's violence can be seen as a microcosm of the larger society, yet at the same time there is a kind of self-hatred turned inward, a social implosion of sorts, going on with the Godbolt family. The denial of their ancestral past reflects the denial of an entire nature of its historical past. That is, this country's refusal, one hundred years later, to deal with the lingering effects of the cancer of slavery.
The title and the theme are intertwined. The characters, in their search for wholeness, whether through materialism, classism or religion, lose sight of the main issue. Just as they will carry nothing out of the world with them when they die, they can not own one another's soul. They can only love one another freely. It is the ability to connect, therefore redeem, one another, which determines the success, or lack thereof, of the characters in the book.
In addition, through out the novel, there is an adoption search which operates on two levels as an allegory. The search of the Diaspora of Blacks for wholeness in America (in that they were torn from Mother Africa) is mirrored by the search of one of the characters for her family tree. The novel deals with the issue of adoption which often runs counter to African American culture due to the history of children being sold away from their mothers. At the same time, the struggles a mother faces who has given a child up for adoption faces, is universal.
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Book Description Paperback. Condition: Good. No Jacket. Pages can have notes/highlighting. Spine may show signs of wear. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less 0.81. Seller Inventory # G0964757613I3N00
Book Description Paperback. Condition: Very Good. No Jacket. Former library book; May have limited writing in cover pages. Pages are unmarked. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less 0.81. Seller Inventory # G0964757613I4N10
Book Description Trade Paperback. Condition: Very Good. BC4 - A tight, clean, sound copy in color wraps with very minor overall shelf wear with some light creasing on the back cover at the extreme top left corner plus the usual library labels and stamps on the spine wrapping around onto the back, inside surface of the front cover, front endpaper, and top outside paper edges plus there is clear plastic tape reinforcing the spine. A family saga about how secrets make for sickness. There is a labyrinth of devastating family secrets and taboos. The core story involving two brothers in love with the same woman. In the first generation the mother loved the younger brother but married the older one for security. Years later their daughter also marries a brother who is her parents' pick. The resulting triangle boomerangs when the daughter returns home after seven years intending to come to terms with her past and to search for a child she was forced to give up for adoption. By the author of "The Ebony Tree" and "A Place Called Home." 244p. Size: 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall. Ex-Library. Seller Inventory # SCW04101