Please note that I received this via NetGalley. This did not impact my rating or review.
Trigger warning: A lynching is described.
Well wow. This was 5 stars and I didn’t want to put it down. I don’t want to talk too much about the book because I don’t want to spoil for potential readers. But this was so freaking good. Taking place in Mississippi in the 1920s, we follow two people, newly married Thea Elliot and “carrier” Marah. Both women are in East Cobb, Mississippi, an all-Black Free and prosperous town like Rosewood, like Tulsa, like so many other towns where Black men, women, and children thrived. But something dark haunts East Cobb and wants to be heard.
Thea is happily married to her husband Kidd. Leaving D.C. for the South, they both feel like it’s something they should do, return to a place where white supremacy had chased their families out from long ago. But as they go South, Thea gets to see her husband differently due to an incident that takes a while to be revealed, but definitely shows what kind of burden many of the Black men in East Cobb are dealing with. Thea though realizes right away something is off with East Cobb and what the expectations of women are to be if they live there. Thea is a journalist and a teacher and feels herself chafing under the ‘rules’ of what women are supposed to do if they live in East Cobb. Marah though is surrounded by her “sisters” and is focused on pushing back on those who won’t let them go and are insisting that they stay “carriers”.
Thea and Marah and the other women in this story (and yes this is a story of Black women) were well done. I initially thought to myself, how great would a town be that is just 100 percent Black men, women, children, not living in fear, until you get to the underbelly of the story. And I would love to write an essay on this book one day. It hits a lot of themes that I think Black women in the here and now are dealing with. How many times have we been told that our Black men need to be treated like Kings to make their homes safe and full of love because of how hard they have it out there in the world being treated like nothing and dealing with the everyday grind of racism in America. But, Holmes pulls that curtain back and lets us see what happens to women who are forced to do that. I loved that we follow both Thea and Marah and then Holmes does a reveal and another and I was like holy crap. And then I had to go back and re-read pieces of the story and then of course just wanted to finish the book because I needed to know how everything ended. I loved every piece of this book and the ending blew me away. I know this book will stay with me for a while.
