Birthright: A Novel

Peter Siner passes for white at Harvard. When he returns to his hometown of Hooker's Bend, Mississippi, the mask begins to crack. A Black man with light enough skin to hide, Peter has spent four years in a world that let him forget the color line. Now he's home, and the Jim Crow South won't let him forget what he is. He wants to build a school for his community, to lift his people but the community he seeks to save includes men and women darker than himself, some of whom remember his mother's shame and his own ambiguous birth. Stribling, a white Southerner writing in 1922, had the audacity to imagine a passing man's reckoning with the color hierarchy even within his own race. The result is uncomfortable, uneven, and occasionally profound. Peter is no hero. He's a man at war with his own reflection, and the novel refuses to let him off easy.