First published 2025
David Levering Lewis sits in his family's Atlanta church, studying the stained glass window that honors his grandmother. The two-time Pulitzer Prize winner realizes he knows almost nothing about the ancestors who worshipped here for generations. At eighty-something, Lewis decides to dig into his past. His research leads him to four family lines that tell the American story in miniature. He discovers the Kings and Belvinses, white slaveholders in Georgia. He uncovers the Bells, a mulatto family who owned slaves in South Carolina. He traces the Lewises, a Black family who rose from bondage in Georgia. His father John Henry Lewis Sr. had worked alongside Thurgood Marshall on civil rights cases and introduced his son to W.E.B. Du Bois. Now Lewis must reckon with all of it. He faces the doors that stayed closed to his forebears and the bonds that slavery created between families. The voices of Clarissa, Isaac, Hattie, Alice, and John emerge from the records to show how kinship and enslavement intertwined across generations.
Genres: biography, family-life, 20th-century, african-american, 21st-century, american-history
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family
Setting: Atlanta, Georgia, South Carolina
Period: 20th-century, 21st-century
384 pages · Hardcover · Penguin Press
Content warnings: slavery