The Supper Table

ississippi Delta, 1957. Ora Lee Colson is a widow, a mother of three, and the woman whose house is on the list - the unwritten list passed hand to hand along the roads that Black musicians travel because the hotels won't have them and the restaurants would rather close than serve them.
When word comes that Solomon "Smoke" Cartwright and his blues band are coming through on Saturday night, Ora Lee begins a three-day preparation that transforms her modest shotgun house into something sacred. She kills the chickens. She presses the tablecloth. She pulls down the good china - the set she only trusts to Easter and the dead.
But Solomon Cartwright is not just any musician passing through. He is the man Ora Lee was supposed to leave with twenty years ago. The man who waited at a bus station and left alone. The man who never knew why she didn't come.
Told through the eyes of Birdie Mae Colson, Ora Lee's fifteen-year-old daughter, The Supper Table is a story about the invisible labor of Black women who fed a nation's music and were never written into the history. It is about food as language, dignity as resistance, and the distance between the life you chose and the life you buried to build it.
A novel that will make you smell your grandmother's kitchen, hear the music through the walls, and sit with a story long after the last plate is washed.

Darryl Wayne Townsend Jr. is the author of seventeen books spanning literary fiction, thrillers, novellas, and nonfiction. His work lives in the spaces between people - the things they can't say, the things they won't say, and the things they say to the wrong person. His novels include Still Water, Rare Pull, Taylor, Glass Empire, and Heavy Load. His nonfiction includes The Catalog Mindset and Don't Blow the Bag. He is the founder of Polymath Portfolio Group LLC and hosts the podcast Wait a Minute, Bitch on Spotify. He lives in Seattle. He is not done.