Black CherokeeBlack Cherokee

"Ophelia Blue Rivers is the specificity of her circumstance. She's not just mixed in American binary sense of being a racial amalgamation of two races; she's a trinity of the three distinct racial identities that make up the identity politics of this continent. She's Part Black, White, and Indigenous (Native American), raised by her grandmother who is a Black descendent of the Cherokee freedmen. A history as rich as it is complicated, Cherokee freedmen were formerly enslaved Africans once owned by Cherokee elites. After Emancipation as well as the Trail of Tears, these former slaves were freed but their belonging to the Cherokee nation remained a point of controversy. Can people who once belonged to another people who were displaced claim birthright to that heritage? A novel in contemporary 1990s South Carolina, Antonio Michael Downing uses Ophelia's search for home and family to dramatize what it means to belong to a people when the terms of that belonging come at such a high price."--