Synopsis
The memoir opens with a traditional West African griot chant and establishes Kearse's role as griotte, the eighth-generation female storyteller for her family since 1990. Kearse explains that griots and griottes serve as "human links between past and present," preserving not just family histories but entire cultures and values. She traces this oral tradition back to her family's first "wordsmith," an enslaved woman called Mandy, whose voice Kearse describes as sounding "like a xylophone: precise, clear, musical" with inflections of the Ga language of Ghana. Kearse recounts the oral tradition passed down through generations that she is a descendant of President James Madison and his enslaved cook and half-sister, Coreen. As an African American pediatrician turned historical detective, Kearse investigates her family's history and, by extension, that of America, noting that while slave owners "successfully abolished many African customs," the tradition of oral history has held strong in African-American families like hers.
The book is structured with 18 numbered chapters interwoven with sections titled "Mandy," which represent the first-person narrative of the family's ancestral enslaved woman. Mandy is captured from her coastal village and enslaved, transported through the Middle Passage, sexual assault by "Massa," and witnesses the abuse of her daughter Coreen. The other chapters discuss the process of historical recovery.
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