FICTION · AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN
Jewell Parker Rhodes
Also known as: Jewell P. Rhodes
Jewell Parker Rhodes (born 1954) is an American bestselling novelist and educator. She is the author of several books for children, including the New York Times bestsellers Will's Race for Home, winner of the Coretta Scott King Book Award; Black Brother, Black Brother; and Ghost Boys, which has garnered more than fifty awards and honors including The Walter Award, the Indies Choice/EB White Read-Aloud Award, and the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award for Older Readers, and was later adapted as Ghost Boys: The Graphic Novel. Rhodes is also the author of Soul Step, Treasure Island: Runaway Gold, Paradise on Fire, Towers Falling and the celebrated Louisiana Girls Trilogy, which includes Ninth Ward, winner of the Coretta Scott King Honor Award; Sugar; and Bayou Magic. Rhodes has written six adult novels: Voodoo Dreams, Magic City, Douglass’ Women, Season, Moon, and Hurricane, as well as the memoir Porch Stories: A Grandmother’s Guide to Happiness, and two writing guides: Free Within Ourselves: Fiction Lessons for Black Authors and The African American Guide to Writing and Publishing Non-Fiction. A reissue of Magic City, a novel about the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, was released in 2021 in recognition of the 100th anniversary.
Three hollow knockings of gourd disturbed the night.
— from Voodoo dreams, 1993
Most acclaimed
Magic City
2007
Based on true events, Magic City is the powerful story of two people who unwittingly lit the match that burned the community of Greenwood to the ground and erased it from the history books. Jewell Parker Rhodes imagines this tragedy through the eyes of Joe Samuels and Mary Keane, two people fundamentally divided by race but forever joined by fate. When Joe, a young man entranced by Houdini, is falsely accused of rape, he must perform his greatest escape by eluding a bloodthirsty lynch mob. Haunted by the mystery of his brother's death and the dark truth behind his father's success, Joe soon learns that he has been running all his life and that this may actually be the moment to turn and fight. Mary, the motherless daughter of a poor farmer who tries to marry her off to the farmhand who viciously raped her, is barely able to imagine what life could be like outside the prison of her own home. Now, however, she must unlock the courage to help exonerate the man she has accused with her panicked cry. Magic City, a mythic tale of violent revenge, is a portrait of an era, climaxing in the heroic but doomed stand that ultimately pitted the National Guard against a small band of black men determined to defend the town they had built into the "Negro Wall Street." Depicted against a backdrop of jail escapes, ghosts, family betrayal, and lost loves, it is a tale at once harrowing and redemptive.
Douglass' Women
2002
"Douglass' Women reimagines the lives of an American hero, Frederick Douglass, and two women - his wife and his mistress - who loved him and lived in his shadow. Anna Douglass, a free woman of color, was Douglass' wife of forty-four years, who bore him five children. Ottilie Assing, a German-Jewish intellectual, provided him the companionship of the mind that he needed. Hurt by Douglass' infidelity, Anna rejected his notion that only literacy freed the mind. For her, familial love rivaled intellectual pursuits. Ottilie was raised by parents who embraced the ideal of free love, but found herself entrapped in an unfulfilling love triangle with America's most famous self-taught slave for nearly three decades."--BOOK JACKET.