In the dawning years of the 20th century, Bessie Daniels leaves her home town of Hot Springs and travels east over the mountains to live with her new husband Fletcher Elliott in the Broad River section of North Carolina. Bess and Fletch stay with Fletcher’s parents for the first five years of their married life with Bessie teaching in a one-room schoolhouse and Fletcher working at the lumber mill in Old Fort while they save to buy property of their own on Stone Mountain. In 1906, they purchase 400 acres of the old Zachariah Solomon Plantation which includes a small house with a shack beside it, a branch of Cedar Creek and a row of dilapidated slave cabins... And ghosts. Thus begins Bessie’s next phase of life where the gift of sight she inherited from her Cherokee ancestors grows stronger, her healing abilities are put to the test, and she encounters a vicious secret society that tries to force her and Fletcher to turn their backs on a sharecropping family living in one of the cabins. When Bessie and Fletch refuse to give in to their demands, the group strikes back, bringing pain and suffering to their once serene existence on Stone Mountain.

Moonfixer (Appalachian Journey)

Literature & Fiction

Tillery, CC

Hunter, Caitlyn

French, Christy Tillery

Literary

Spring Creek Press

A debut hybrid-memoir from Caitlyn Hunter, an inaugural Emerging Black Artists in Residence at Chatham. Digging into the history of ourselves, the stories we tell are just as important as the facts--who was there, who rose above, how they did it, if they did it. There isn't one long line connecting us to our ancestors; there is a constellation. Mixing history with folktales, Caitlyn Hunter's POWER IN THE TONGUE centers not Black pain, but Black perseverance spanning centuries. In this hybrid of memoir and fiction, Hunter holds a mirror up to herself and in her reflection shows us ancestors, hypothetical and real, as well as a present world of oscillating tensions. She creates an interior world infused with magic, tricksters, talking animals, chopped hair, red and blue flashing lights, Pittsburgh steel. There is power in the tongue and the things it can say. "POWER IN THE TONGUE sings a song of survival. But Hunter's words challenge the act of surviving to do more. Her essays weave a familial tapestry of magic, trauma, defiance, and the cyclical rebirth of Black Women across generations. By breathing "truth into the fables" of her ancestors, she creates life from their stories, making sure their songs continue to be heard."-- Nicole Lourette, Editor Nonfiction. Memoir. Hybrid.

Power in the Tongue

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

Tolsun Books

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