Divining Freedom

Divining Freedom is a multigenerational epic tracing the Great Migration and its aftermath — the journey of Black Americans who escaped the Jim Crow South, built institutions in the promised cities of the North, and discovered that freedom in America is never granted, only contested.

Set across 128 years and five generations in Detroit, East St. Louis, and the rural South, the novel follows the builders and the betrayers — the men who constructed churches, political machines, medical dynasties, and underground economies in the name of liberation, and the women whose theology, labor, and vision made those institutions possible while being systematically erased from them.

Divining Freedom traces the shapeshifting face of American racism — from violent exclusion to predatory inclusion to the quiet machinery of wealth extraction that turns Black neighborhoods into assets and Black families into collateral damage. It asks what happens when emerging Black institutions, built to resist conquest, begin to practice it. When liberation theology becomes a vehicle for personal empire. When the dream of generational wealth cannot be separated from the corruption required to pursue it.

And it answers with the women. The women who carried the fire when the institutions hollowed out. Who pushed back when the men they loved became the men they feared. Who claimed their place — in the pulpit, in the streets, in city hall — and began the long work of reshaping what Detroit could become.

A novel about what freedom costs when love is missing from the blueprint — and what becomes possible when women refuse to let it stay that way.