Moonrise Over New Jessup-First Chapter

I am still in residence at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, but I was fortunate enough to make this video on my Auntie J’s porch swing in Montgomery, Alabama a couple of weeks ago.

*What a great morning, loves! I must interrupt today’s regularly scheduled programming to shout from the rooftops that:

📣 DR. IMANI PERRY WON THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD! 📣

Her spectacular book, “South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation,” is a gorgeous reckoning with American history, and her brilliant writing has been a call, and a beacon, many times over for me. Congratulations to Dr. Perry and her family. I am thrilled to see her getting the recognition she so rightly deserves.

I cross-posted my dear friend Robert’s post about Dr. Perry’s award early this morning (complete with a must-watch video celebration of Black joy and the most pitch-perfect acceptance speech on God’s green earth). In case you missed it, his words can be found at

Witness

.

Now . . . about that video I promised . . .

Good morning loves, and welcome to Lioness Tales! Welcome to those watching for the first time, and thanks to those of you who visit time and again. As you can see, I’m on my Auntie J’s porch swing in Montgomery, Alabama. Same rules apply as always when it comes to the world, so if you hear a car roll by or neighbors greeting each other (*spoiler—neighbors saw me filming and did, indeed, greet me this morning, and I dig it because that’s just what the world needs), or if I make a mistake on a line, we’re just going to roll with it because that’s what we do.

Today, I’m going to introduce you to Alice Young. My debut novel, Moonrise Over New Jessup, follows Alice as she descends the bus into 1957 New Jessup, Alabama—an independent, self-reliant Black settlement (or Freedmen’s Town or “Booker T Town”) that has thrived on the “other side of the woods” from whitefolks for nearly sixty years. Alice gets off the bus and she’s all Alabama—she’s smart, determined, creative, resilient, and she knows her own mind. And in New Jessup, where she can be supported, she can be all of these things. She can be the moonrise because she can rise and shine in Blackness.

So it’s no wonder Raymond Campbell tumbles head over heels for her. He’s a town grandson who has also secretly courted a civil rights organization to help improve New Jessup’s political and economic power, even though being associated with “agitators” could get him, and anyone with him, expelled from town. And that’s only if they don’t find out on the other side of the woods first.

But this is Alice’s story, from the first word to the last. It’s the story of the women beside the men when those men hardly had an inkling of a dream. It’s the story of how Alice, and women like her, were young women once, young wives once, young mamas once, who also had the unique responsibility of making these men who they were to become. Women doing whatever it takes to protect their family and their home—the words “family” and “home” meaning a whole lot. Moonrise Over New Jessup is Alice’s tale of what “whatever it takes” looks like. And it’s dedicated to my mama, in her place among the stars.