Tangleroot

What are the boundaries between our individual or family stories and our national history? What can we learn from both of them? What if you find out your family story isn’t what you expected? Author and previous interpreter for the Museum’s Meet the Revolution programming series Kalela Williams has come out with her debut historical novel, Tangleroot. It tells the story of a young African American woman named Noni Reed and her mother, a renowned Black literature scholar named Dr. Radiance Castine, as they arrive to their new home of Tangleroot at the fictional Stonepost College in rural Virginia.

The fictional house of Tangleroot was built by Noni's ancestor, an enslaved man named Cuffee Fortune (whose name is likely a nod to real-life Black revolutionary figures Paul Cuffee and James Forten). Believing that Fortune was the original founder of Stonepost College, Noni’s mother spends much of her time piecing together the evidence to lobby the university to not only change the name of the school in Cuffee’s honor but to also force it to reckon with its own racist past.

Over the course of the book, Noni learns more about the house, the original slave-owning family who once lived there, and her own family’s connections to these stories. Noni navigates the challenges of facing as well as grappling with historic and present racism as a young adult while living in a historic place, though fictional in this case.

Read an excerpt as Noni travels to Philadelphia to learn more about her family’s connections to her new home of Tangleroot.

Excerpt

In the dim and lamp-lit reading room, I spread the papers across the long table. There were a dozen hand-drawn sketches of gowns. Rather than the bell-shaped skirts pasted on my closet door, these dresses boasted slimmer silhouettes and graceful trains. But unlike those fully formed figures, these were vague and seemed to be dynamic. Women were drawn striding, moving, waltzing. You could make a flip-book out of all the papers.

"The artist sketched dresses from the Edwardian era, the early 1900s.” Hershel Ashe, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania's senior curator, was a tall, large man who spoke in a low, slow voice. He sounded disinterested, even grumpy, but he knew what I was looking for even when I struggled to describe it. I hadn't called in advance, I'd just shown up blabbering about dresses at the front desk.

The trip to Philadelphia was a surprise, even for me. Spring break had snuck up on me, and Mom reminded me she was leaving town again, which meant I could secretly travel. I was able to get my Charm shifts covered for a couple of days, and thankful not to have the chunky commitment of Cicada Chilton's magnolia gown – not that Cicada knew. Yet. Telling her no seemed more difficult than figuring out how to make the dress. I would text Cicada, I just needed to think of a way to say why I changed my mind.

Because how could I sew the dress, after what I learned about the woman my great-great-grandmother created it for? The woman who slapped Fawnie Castine, my gramma?

But I had to figure out what was up with the scrap tacked to my set door, the one shaded with turquoise pencil. If somehow, my great-grandmother Lacey had been in the bedroom belonging to a dead white slaveholding girl. Maybe I could prove to Mom that Valerie was right – that our maternal line originated up north.

And then maybe, Mom would learn to trust Valerie again.

Hershel set out a sketched blue-green dress on a figure with her undefined arms outstretched, a gown with a flurry of sheer panels, like ruffles on the ocean. I breathed in deeply, because it looked so much like the dress I'd designed and sewn as the character Miranda's wedding gown in The Tempest.

And because the bottom corner of the page was torn off. "Wow. There it is," I said.

“Fits perfectly.” Hershel watched as I puzzle-pieced the ripped scrap of paper from my closet. “When I started here twelve years ago, the retiring senior curator told me of a tradition: Every new senior curator was challenged to find the source of a random package that arrived in 1966. It was just a packet of sketches. The envelope didn’t even list a return address or a name: just “Tangleroot.”

Kalela Williams, Tangleroot (Macmillan, 2024), 164-165.