House Behind the Cedars

The year is 1882. Reconstruction has collapsed, and in a small North Carolina town, a Black man named John Warwick has done the unthinkable: he has crossed the color line and built a new life in the white world. Now he returns home to find his sister Rena, beautiful and naive, still living in the shadow of their mixed heritage. When John falls for a white woman, he must choose between the identity he's constructed and the family that defined him. What follows is a tragedy of the heart, a story of passing, and a searing indictment of a society that makes such impossible choices necessary. Chesnutt, writing at the turn of the twentieth century, gave voice to the silent catastrophe of American race relations with psychological depth and moral complexity that would influence Wright, Morrison, and every American writer who came after. This is the novel James Baldwin was born to read, and it remains essential a century later.