Black Cherokee
A Novel
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Queenie meets Frying Plantain in this courageous coming-of-age story, set in the 1990s, about a mixed-race Black girl fighting for recognition in a South Carolina Cherokee community that refuses to accept her ancestry as legitimate.
On the rain-swollen banks of the River Etsi in South Carolina, Ophelia Blue Rivers—six years old in 1992—catches frogs and stretches to reach the swaying sunflowers. She’s an orphan raised in a rustic cabin by her Grandma Blue, a descendent of the Black Cherokee Freedmen. Caught in deep currents of history that she doesn’t understand, she is, as her grandma says: “half Black, half Cherokee, and all mixed up.”
While Ophelia may not always understand where she came from, there’s no mistaking where she’d rather be: caught in the warmth of Grandma Blue’s cabin, listening to bedtime Cherokee legends as collard greens hiss in the frying pan.
But one day, a tall stranger with a black denim jacket and a charming smile appears, and his arrival shatters Ophelia’s world. She finds herself whisked away from all she knows to live with her Auntie Oba, the boisterous woman she had only met in rumours.
So begins Ophelia’s spirited, at times harrowing, search for home and family—a journey that takes her from a majority-white high school to the inner sanctum of a Black evangelical church to the throbbing dance floors of underground Southern clubs and to a final, devastating encounter with the scion of a wealthy, white family. She must ask herself: What does it mean to belong when the terms of that belonging come at such a high price?
With dazzling language, keen insight, and an unforgettable voice, Black Cherokee is not only an astonishing novel but a profound meditation on race, identity, and coming of age from a major literary talent.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this earnest if underdeveloped first novel from Downing (Saga Boy, a memoir), a girl struggles with her mixed heritage. It's 1993 in the South Carolina settlement of Etsi, where seven-year-old Ophelia lives with her grandmother on land that was once part of a Cherokee reservation. Due to her mix of Black and Cherokee ancestry, Ophelia is mistreated by her full-blooded Cherokee neighbors. After a nearby cattle ranch pollutes the local river, Ophelia moves in with her aunt Aiyanna, who identifies as Black, in the city of Stone River. As the years pass, Ophelia is no more accepted, and Tejah, a beautiful and popular classmate at her predominantly Black high school, bullies her for her dual identity and for hanging out with fellow "nerd" Durell. She's delighted when Lucy, a family friend close to her age, invites her to a Baptist church, but she grows disenchanted when Lucy sours on her out of jealousy over the attention she receives from the youth pastor, who celebrates her salvation in front of the whole congregation. Episodes like these are poignant, but secondary characters such as Durell, Lucy, and Tejah are frustratingly flat. Still, Downing satisfies with his portrayal of the complex Ophelia and her attempt to find herself. It's an affecting if uneven coming-of-age tale.
