Soul Purpose

Racism has been insidiously woven into the fabric of America for decades. Soul Purpose presents two stories, one fiction, one based on historical fact, but both delving into the depths of hatred racism brings.  


In 1965 rural Georgia, blacks weren’t allowed to eat in restaurants or share bathrooms with the white population. Kelly, a young boy growing up in Forsyth County, is the son of an alcoholic and racist father. His mother tries to educate her son about equality but when Kelly meets an African American psychiatrist, Dr. Hubble, he innocently asks the man, “Are you a n****r?”  Dr. Hubble answers the boy’s question with honesty and compassion. From that moment on, Kelly, with the help of his mother and Dr. Hubble, breaks the cycle of racism that plagued their family’s history.


Decades earlier, in 1912 in the same community, a white woman named Mae Crowe was raped and murdered. Her father, also the local district attorney, sentenced two black men to a public hanging for the crime. Race riots broke out, forcing the community’s black citizens to sell their homes for a fraction of their value and leave the county.


Sewell’s riveting novel artfully blends fact and fiction to give the reader a greater understanding of racism spanning the last century. Soul Purpose is a significant, social commentary about the necessity of healing deep racial wounds, both real and imagined, to bring about change.