num_pages: 272
description: A spellbinding debut novel tracing three generations of a Southern Black family and one daughters discovery that she has the power to change her familys legacy.Summer 1995: Ten-year-old Joan her mother and her younger sister flee her fathers explosive temper and seek refuge at her mothers ancestral home in Memphis. This is not the first time violence has altered the course of the familys trajectory. Half a century earlier Joans grandfather built this majestic house in the historic Black neighborhood of Douglassonly to be lynched days after becoming the first Black detective in the city. Joan tries to settle into her new life but family secrets cast a longer shadow than any of them expected.As she grows up Joan finds relief in her artwork painting portraits of the community in Memphis. One of her subjects is their enigmatic neighbor Miss Dawn who claims to know something about curses and whose stories about the past help Joan see how her passion imagination and relentless hope are in fact the continuation of a long matrilineal tradition. Joan begins to understand that her mother her mothers mother and the mothers before them persevered made impossible choices and put their dreams on hold so that her life would not have to be defined by loss and angerthat the sole instrument she needs for healing is her paintbrush.Unfolding over seventy years through a chorus of unforgettable voices that move back and forth in time Memphis paints an indelible portrait of inheritance celebrating the full complexity of what we pass down in a family and as a country: brutality and justice faith and forgiveness sacrifice and love.
language: English
title: Memphis
publisher: The Dial Press