A NOVEL INSPIRED BY ETHNOGRAPHIC RESEARCH

Inspired by my experiences growing up in a Black funeral home family in NC and twenty years of research in a community of Afro-Latin carnival devils in Panamá, A PART OF MY THAT’S MINE is a women-centered transnational family saga.

Less than a month after her disastrous fortieth birthday, Lucy Delany sat with her head pressed against a window on a flight between her hometown of Bearden, NC and Corazón, Panamá. Tears reddened her deep brown eyes and stress threatened to claw a hole through her stomach. The landscape of her life was changing. Two weeks ago, she had never heard of Corazón. Then, a phone call in broken English from a man she did not know and a painful confession from her aunt changed everything. Now she was leaving the only home she knew to meet a family that might not welcome or even want her. As alone and uncertain as she felt, Lucy knew two things for sure: that her mother was a liar and that Corazón held an urgent truth.

A PART OF ME THAT’S MINE is a novel that mixes magical realism, myth, memory, and history to construct US and Panamanian characters that engage with the thresholds between their variegated hemispheric Blackness. These thresholds trouble the perceived boundaries between imagined and “real” family, between the world of the living and that of the dead, and between the truths we make into lies and the lies that we make true in the service of race, ethnicity, class, and family. Importantly, the conventions of the novel allow me a site through which to render longer scenes from my Portobelo field notes and to attend to aspects of everyday life in greater detail than did the ethnographic monograph or essays.

A PART OF ME THAT’S MINE is represented by Beth Marshea, Ladderbird Literary Agency.