KINGDOM OF NO TOMORROW

A coming-of-age story mixes Black Panther Party ideals with besotted romance.

It’s 1968 and Nettie Boileau, the beautiful, orphaned daughter of a murdered Haitian doctor, arrives in Oakland, eager to assist with the first free medical outreach of the Black Panther Party. “If she couldn’t do this, then what point was there in even living?” 20-year-old Nettie asks herself, in a story built of breathless interior rumination. Her best friend, Clia Brown, is crushing on her, but the novel’s opening scene supplies Nettie with another reason to exist when she “lock[s] eyes” with the capable Panther Party captain, Melvin Mosley. He has been called in to dispatch the racists menacing the home of a boy with sickle cell anemia, but “what distressed her the most was how handsome he was.” In due course, Melvin will give Nettie a gun and a pregnancy, two time-honored plot devices. Nettie takes both to the Midwest, following Melvin to his assignment to help open an Illinois chapter of the party. Young Nettie soaks up the rhetoric of Stokely Carmichael; she “caught those words like falling rain, swallowed them like holy water.” But the high of revolutionary ardor precedes the low of Melvin’s infidelities and the bitter winters of Chicago. Worse, the FBI moves in to shut down the Panthers, and it’s Nettie and her body that pay the price. Josaphat, a Haitian-born writer living in South Florida, quotes Huey P. Newton, Fred Hampton, and James Baldwin to strong effect. Police are “pigs” here, and the Panthers’ newspaper “was like a portal,” reporting “who in the community had been imprisoned, whose death went uninvestigated, whose bail needed to be posted, and who needed legal assistance.” The author is drawing clear parallels between police violence then and now. In her acknowledgements, Josaphat writes that she has “always been fascinated by the minds of radicals.” Unhappily, her cliched prose makes a poor container for the history she reveres.

A strong premise set amid the Black Panther Party falters in its execution.