Excerpt from New People by Danzy Senna, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Maria is trying to write about their music—an ethnomusicology of the Peoples Temple. She is trying to uncover the modes of resistance in the hymns and melodies they recorded when they were alive. She is trying to excavate, using their music, the clues not to why they would commit suicide but to how they survived as long as they did. She argued in her proposal that the music was a form of resistance to Jim Jones himself. Her project is going to be—is supposed to be—a radical reclamation of Jonestown on behalf of the people who built it.

The last time Maria saw her dissertation advisor, he was packing up his office to go on sabbatical. He told her he didn't think she'd found it yet, the true meaning of her work. He said, You're still circling the jungle, Maria. You're still afraid to land.

When they said goodbye at the door to his office, he asked her if she was dreaming about Jonestown yet. Did it come to her at night?

She told him no, she wasn't dreaming of it yet. He smiled and said, Then you're not working hard enough. They need to be in your dreams. Maria shows up every day. And every day she comes upon a new revelation about the people of Jonestown. Just the other day she discovered that the hand-painted sign they kept hanging in their pavilion, the one that read, Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it, was a slight misquote of a line from George Santayana; the real quote said those who "cannot" remember the past. It seems to her this was a serious error, but she can't figure out why.

Today she closes her eyes and listens to an audiocassette of the Peoples Temple Choir album. It was released in 1973 when they were still based in the church front on Geary Boulevard in San Francisco. A copy of the actual LP is wrapped in plastic in the special collections library across campus. She has held it in her hands. On the cover is a photograph, a hundred choir members standing at the edge of a lake. The women are wearing floor-length blue satin gowns and the men are wearing starched white shirts. They look somehow both old-timey and hip, just like the music they make, which sounds a little bit gospel, a little bit rock and roll. The first cut is the children's song. They sound so clear and bright that she feels as if they are here with her. Their voices rise and fall with what she imagines is the conductor's baton.

He keeps me singing a happy song.
He keeps me singing it all day long.
Although my days may be drear,
He always is near,
And that's why my heart is always filled with song.

* * *

The next time she sees the poet, she is walking through the Village, going to meet Khalil for lunch with friends. It's a cold afternoon. The weather has turned. She has just come from the library. She is wearing her peacoat and her red scarf.

She sees him before he sees her. He's standing up ahead looking in the window of a record shop. She catches her breath and stops several feet away.

The restaurant where she's headed is up around the block and she is already a few minutes late, but instead of going on her way she just stands there stiffly until the poet looks up and sees her.

He does a double take, squints at her, as if trying to remember how he knows her. Then he smiles slightly and walks toward her. Hey, you, he says.

She says his name aloud, thinking, not for the first time, that he doesn't remember hers. They've met several times in loud places, and they've shaken hands, but she cannot recall him ever once saying her name. She is too embarrassed to tell it to him now.

Where you headed?

Meeting a friend. She looks away, toward the street, the omission burning on her tongue.

You live around here?

She tells him she lives in Brooklyn.

From New People. Published by Riverhead Books, a member of Penguin Group USA (LLC). Copyright © Danzy Senna, 2017.