Thank you to my niece, wife-mother-caretaker extraordinaire Gabrielle Monique Morris, who holds it down for our family and keeps the Paschal-James matrilineal tradition thriving. Gabbie, I hope you know that you have made my work possible. I love you, baby girl.
My beloved “play brother,” James William Richardson Jr., and my dear blood sister, Sidonie Colette Jeffers, have passed on to the Ancestors, but they are not forgotten.
I am so grateful to Native American colleagues who have accepted me as kin and encouraged my writing about Afro-Indigenous people（s） and history: Brother-Elder Geary Hobson, Kimberly Weiser, and Rachel Jackson. In particular, Brother Geary spent patient hours explaining to me Afro-Indigenous history and giving me the titles of books I should read. Neither Kimberly nor Brother Geary shamed me as I asked what I know （now） were very elementary questions about southeastern Indigenous history. Thank you to Faron Bear and Rain C. Goméz, too, for their encouragement of my Indigenous journey.
Gratitude to the organizations that provided me with financial support during the writing of this book: Aspen Summer Words Conference, Sewanee Writers Conference, and the University of Oklahoma.
As I always write on every acknowledgments page, I have been sustained by mentors through the years: Maggie Anderson, Lucille Clifton （rest in peace）， Hank Lazer, David Lynn, Jerry Ward Jr., and Afaa M. Weaver. The elders guide me in a needful time.
Other various, wonderful human beings encouraged me while writing this book, in particular Barbara Soloski Albin, Huda Al-Murashi, Herman Beavers, Remica Bingham-Risher, Joan Brannon, Angela Brooks, Joanna Brooks, Kimberly Burns, Heidi Durrow, Julia Eagleton, Oscar Enriquez, Paul Erickson, Brigitte Fielder, John Freeman, Ernesto Fuentes, Helena de Groot, Logan Garrison, Shannon Gibney, Bailey Hoffner, Lynette Bloomberg, Wilhelmina Jenkins, Andrew Jeon, Tayari Jones, Randall Keenan, Keegan Long-Wheeler, Tanya Mears, Valerie Moore, Jim Moran, Fred Moten, Meredith Neuman, Emily Pawley, Laura Pegram, Michael Perry, Cherise Pollard, Riché Richardson, Bala Saho, Mungu Sanchez, Jonathan Senchyne, John Stewart, Jeanie Thompson, Natasha Trethewey, Jacqueline Allen Trimble, Margaret Porter Troupe, Quincy Troupe, Liz Van Hoose, Anthony Walton, Stephanie Powell Watts, and Crystal Wilkinson.
As always, gratitude to my African brothers—my “trois frères”—Chris Abani, Kwame Dawes, and Matthew Shenoda.
This is undoubtedly a woman’s novel, and there are two women in particular who kept me going through the writing of this book. My literary agent, Sarah Burnes, and my Harper editor, Erin Wicks, two fiercely feminist, brilliant souls. They gave me courage when my confidence lagged and were honest but nurturing. Both Sarah and Erin perform so much emotional labor and I want to acknowledge that, for the work of women is not always noticed or rewarded.
And finally, I am here on this earth to tend Ancestral altars. I am here to speak of many tribes: the Cherokee, the Creek, the Wolof, the Akan, the Yoruba. And the many gatherings that I cannot name.
I am here to give gratitude to those who came before. They live within me: The people. The folks. Their songs.
Archival Coda
This is not an academic history book. This is a work of historical fiction, and so I’m not going to provide a ten-page bibliography of all the texts I read over a ten-year period. That would take too long.
Instead, I begin with the man whose name （hopefully） blesses me in this creative enterprise: William Edward Burghardt Du Bois. I read David Levering Lewis’s hefty, utterly necessary biographies of the great scholar, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 and W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963 at least five times while writing this novel.
Du Bois wrote too many books for me to mention here, but the most beloved （for me） are The Souls of Black Folk, Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil, and Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept. In addition, I read the digitized correspondence of Du Bois on the Special Collections and University Archives website of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, paying close attention to his correspondence with Jessie Fauset. And webdubois.org is an excellent resource for the many out-of-print essays by Du Bois. Two excellent works on the woefully understudied Jessie Fauset are Jessie Redmon Fauset, Black American Writer by Carolyn Wedin Sylvander and Women of the Harlem Renaissance by Cheryl A. Wall.
This is a Black feminist novel. I’m unapologetic about that. Several works not only helped me with Ailey’s intellectual progress as a young Black feminist/womanist, but also with character interactions. Kimberlé Crenshaw’s “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color”; Jennifer L. Morgan’s Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery; All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave, edited by Akasha Gloria Hull, Patricia Bell-Scott, and Barbara Smith; bell hooks’s Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism; and Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens are all like scripture to me. Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God was my first introduction （on the page） to a Black feminist heroine as well as to the African American southern vernacular that my mother’s family spoke.