A Novel
by LaShonda Barnett
A new American classic: a dynamic tale of triumph against the odds and the compelling story of one woman's struggle for equality that belongs alongside Jazz by Toni Morrison and The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Ivoe Williams, the precocious daughter of a Muslim cook and a metalsmith from central-east Texas, first ignites her lifelong obsession with journalism when she steals a newspaper from her mother's white employer. Living in the poor, segregated quarter of Little Tunis, Ivoe immerses herself in printed matter as an escape from her dour surroundings. She earns a scholarship to the prestigious Willetson College in Austin, only to return over-qualified to the menial labor offered by her hometown's racially-biased employers.
Ivoe eventually flees the Jim Crow South with her family and settles in Kansas City, where she and her former teacher and lover, Ona, found the first female-run African American newspaper, Jam On the Vine. In the throes of the Red Summer - the 1919 outbreak of lynchings and race riots across the Midwest - Ivoe risks her freedom, and her life, to call attention to the atrocities of segregation in the American prison system.
Skillfully interweaving Ivoe's story with those of her family members, LaShonda Katrice Barnett's Jam! On the Vine is both an epic vision of the hardships and injustices that defined an era and a moving and compelling story of a complicated history we only thought we knew.
"Starred Review. This compelling work of historical fiction about a black female journalist escaping Jim Crow laws of the South and fighting injustice in Kansas City, MO, through her reportage, will bring wider recognition to the role of the African American press in American history, especially during 1919's Red Summer of lynchings and race rioting in northern cities." - Library Journal
"An impassioned historical novel chronicles the early-20th-century resurgence of African-American activism through the life of a poor Texas girl who channels a lifelong love of newsprint into a groundbreaking journalism career... Barnett excels here at what for most writers is a difficult task: evoking what it feels like to grow into one's calling as a writer through psychological intimacy as much as immediate experiences." - Kirkus
"A celebration of beauty, boldness, of the flowering of family, and the triumph of liberty against the odds that freedom and justice always face, this big-hearted kaleidoscopic novel illuminates our history and Barnett's indomitable protagonist lifts up the reader." - Amy Bloom
Jam On the Vine is a wonder of a first novel. Following the struggles of one remarkable family through generations of adversity, this powerful and beautifully written story resonates with historical significance and shines in the end with the triumph of the human spirit." - Amy Greene, author of Bloodroot and Long Man
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