Status Updates From Contending Forces

Wowowow I am loving this. Very romantic esq, romance plots, all while discussing important issues of race and gender. Hopkins keeps you super engaged

Wow this book immerses you from the beginning. Hopkins tells us in the preface the first few chapters are based off of real events and it makes the evilness of the schemes even more appalling to the reader.

foreword is beautiful

The American Colored League hearing is where the aim of this novel became apparent to me and why there has been such an emphasis on mixed race heritage and miscegenation. Hopkins sees these people as bearing the psychosexual trauma of being the living legacy of decades of slavery and sexual violence.

Part of what is nice about this book is how it places in fiction so much of the problems plaguing African Americans in the northern United States that, yeah, I vaguely remember from history books, but which hits a bit different in this fictionalized account. Hopkins also tries to shine a light on the complex sectional politics and notions of “blackness” that lead to the self-destruction of Pan-Africa.

I ran into a cognitive speedbump because Hopkins is purposefully evasive in directly connecting the Smith family to the escaped Jesse Montfort, I assume as a way to thematically underline his attempted break from his past. It’s doubly confusing when his… grandchildren??? are presented with what appears to be the Montfort last name, but I assume that this is, like, their second middle name.