MOONRISE OVER NEW JESSUP

A Southern community confronts the meaning of Black power.

In a warmly appealing book debut, Minnicks, winner of the 2021 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, considers the fraught question of integration from the perspective of an all-Black community in rural Alabama. It’s 1957, and Alice Young is on her way to Birmingham after fleeing abuse in the segregated town where she grew up. Getting off the bus to stretch her legs, she is incredulous to find herself in a place with no “WHITES ONLY signs and backdoor Negro entrances.” New Jessup, she learns, had been established by freedmen who separated from the White community “across the woods,” where they had worked “from field to house and everywhere inside.” Even after Whites tried to run the Black people of New Jessup off the land, they rebuilt and set down roots, started thriving businesses, a school, a hospital, and farms. But, Alice soon discovers, there are troubles: A growing national movement for desegregation has incited dissension. Some in New Jessup agree with the NAACP that integration will be favorable for Blacks; others, that “independence, and not mixing” is a better goal. In New Jessup, the independence movement is adopted by the National Negro Advancement Society, whose aim is “keeping folks from across the woods outta our hair and our pockets for good!” Alice would prefer to distance herself from politics, but she becomes immersed in the controversy when she falls in love with an NNAS activist. How, the NNAS asks, can separation work for Negro communities? Will integration mean equal rights—or merely upending lives for something neither Blacks nor Whites want? What is a viable path to real power? Minnicks’ impassioned characters struggle with those questions as they think about the consequences of court-mandated integration and the reality of living in a society where, Alice realizes, “not all unwelcoming is posted in the window at eye level.”

A thoughtful look at a complex issue.