Rachel Eliza Griffiths’ luminescent novel centers on the Kindreds, one of two Black families living in Salt Point, Maine, in 1957. Haunted by past injustices, and facing increasing threats to their safety, 13-year-old Cinthy, her sister Ezra, and their resolute parents rely on the sustaining love of family – present and past. It’s a devastating story of remarkable resilience.
https://www.csmonitor.com/Books/2023/0720/Childhood-mystery-and-friendship-Our-10-favorite-July-reads
Read MoreRachel Eliza Griffiths discusses her novel Promise:
Rachel Eliza Griffiths discusses Promise: https://www.cnn.com/videos/tv/2023/07/14/rachel-eliza-griffiths-promise-book-amanpour-salman-rushdie.cnn
Read MoreRachel Eliza Griffiths is smart, she's funny and she's kind. She's a beautiful poet and a photographer, whose black-and-white images evoke for me, Dorothea Lange. Her latest book, Promise, tells the story of two Black sisters growing up in New England during the Civil Rights movement, the story of food at the table and food in the kitchen. For food is important to Eliza. Today in The River Cafe, we will talk together about friendship, memory, writing and love.Please rate & review the podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
For more information, recipes, and ingredients, go to:
Web: https://rivercafe.co.uk/Instagram: www.instagram.com/ruthiestable4Facebook: https://en-gb.facebook.com/therivercafelondon/
“There’s a strength you don’t realise you don’t have access to.”
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jun/17/writer-rachel-eliza-griffiths-promise-novel-salman-rushdie-attack
Read MoreThe Center for Fiction welcomes Rachel Eliza Griffiths in celebration of her debut novel, Promise. Set in 1957 at the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement, Griffiths’s luminous work speaks to the often-overlooked experiences of Black people in integrated communities of New England, richly illustrating one family’s powerful story of resistance. As rising tensions reach their idyllic, isolated Maine village and violence, prejudice, and fear continue to escalate among their previously friendly white neighbors, the Kindred family commits great acts of heroism and grace on their path to survival. Cornell University professor Nafissa Thompson-Spires, the author of Heads of the Colored People (winner of the PEN Open Book Award), joins Griffiths for a powerful discussion about “a secret history of an America we think we know, but never really knew” (Marlon James).
Registration Link: https://centerforfiction.org/event/the-center-for-fiction-presents-rachel-eliza-griffiths-on-promise-with-nafissa-thompson-spires/
The stirring debut novel from poet Griffiths (Seeing the Body) depicts the insidious reach of racism in the Jim Crow era. Cinthy and Ezra Kindred are growing up in 1950s coastal Maine. Their father is a teacher at their school, and the Kindreds’ friendship with the Junketts, the only other Black family in their small town, is happy and sustaining. But in the fallout from the passage of the 1957 Civil Rights Act, the families’ relationships with their white neighbors start to sour. Ezra’s longtime best friend Ruby insults the girls’ mother by repeating a racist slur said by her own mother, and the sheriff’s deputy intimidates the Junketts by repeatedly cruising past their house. These developments dredge up painful stories of the Kindred family’s past in Delaware, where Cinthy and Ezra’s great-grandfather’s church was burned down by white supremacists decades earlier. Griffiths’ poetic sensibilities shine in the lyrical language she uses to describe horrific events (“a slicked comet of blood”). The depiction of the families’ isolation and vulnerability feels all too real, as does Griffiths’ portrayal of how dignity and resilience are passed down through generations. This stands as an affirmation of a family’s fierce pride and hard-won joy. Agent: Jin Auh, Wylie Agency. (July)
Read MoreJim Crow was at home not only in the South.
This is a gorgeous and heart-stopping account of the casual and calculated racism endured by a Black family in 1950s Maine as well as the love and strength that sustain them. Hyacinth “Cinthy” Kindred, the bookish and observant 13-year-old narrator, begins her story with a description of the idyllic last days of summer 1957, before school begins in her seaside hometown of Salt Point. Matter-of-fact references to the isolation in which her family lives take on increased resonance as Cinthy relates the events of several months in the life of her family, which has endured decades of generational harm that still echoes at the birth of the Civil Rights Movement. Cinthy and her older sister, Ezra, negotiate the early days of their adolescence and their growing awareness of the ways in which their lives will differ from those of their White schoolmates, particularly the impoverished and preternaturally ambitious Ruby. Griffiths’ origin stories for several characters serve to reveal the horrors the Kindreds face. Lynchings, burnings, drownings, beatings, legal threats, and vicious schoolroom taunts create the backdrop for the deliberate steps taken by Cinthy’s parents—and by their only local Black friends, the Junketts—to instill the pride and strength that will be required for their children to follow “the Path” they are on to self-determination, equality, and respect. Griffiths’ considerable talent as a poet creates space for descriptions of otherwise unspeakable horrors. (One character’s suicide is described as his having “swallowed the mercy of his own gun.”)
A stunning and evocative portrait of love, pride, and survival.
Read MoreLiterary Hub is pleased to reveal the cover for Rachel Eliza Griffiths’s novel Promise, which Danielle Evans calls “a stunning exploration of the weight and triumph of legacy” and which will be published by Random House in July.
Here’s some more about the book from the publisher:
The Kindred sisters—Ezra and Cinthy—have grown up with an abundance of love. Love from their parents, who let them believe that the stories they tell on stars can come true. Love from their neighbors, the Junketts, the only other Black family in town, whose home is filled with spice-rubbed ribs and ground-shaking hugs. And love for their adopted hometown of Salt Point, a beautiful Maine village perched high up on coastal bluffs.
But as the girls hit adolescence, their white neighbors, including Ezra’s best friend, Ruby, start to see their maturing bodies and minds in a different way. And as the news from distant parts of the country fills with calls for freedom, equality, and justice for Black Americans, the white villagers of Salt Point begin to view the Kindreds and the Junketts as threats to their way of life. Amid escalating violence, prejudice, and fear, bold Ezra and watchful Cinthy must reach deep inside the wells of love they’ve built to commit great acts of heroism and grace on the path to survival.
In luminous, richly descriptive writing, Promise celebrates one family’s story of resistance. It’s a book that will break your heart—and then rebuild it with courage, hope, and love.
“I’d always written poetry and fiction, both mediums living in me as much as my need to claim myself as a visual artist,” Griffiths told Literary Hub.
When my mother died in 2014, I began to write my first novel after so many earlier attempts. So the genesis of Promise began as a love letter to my mother and the motherless ache I sensed in myself. The novel is a story of two Black sisters coming of age in a small Maine town in 1957, who vow to love themselves in spite of the harm the world has promised them—something they begin to feel acutely when they hit adolescence and develop a transformational awareness of their bodies. When I first glimpsed the painting that would become the cover of my novel, it was if I was seeing one of my young heroines reflected back at me. The figure of a young Black girl lying with her face raised to the sky while clasping a dandelion is nearly how my novel begins. In that single dandelion, and the wishes I imagine the girl might be making on it, I see the wild horizon of possibility, joy, harm, and vulnerability that are so often tied to youth and its loss. I also see my own urgent wish to gather love, respect, and power in the name of Black women’s lives, which I set out to do in this book and in everything I make.
The painting in question is “Ruminations” by Megan Gabrielle Harris. “When I learned that Rachel Eliza Griffiths chose this painting for the cover of her debut novel, Promise, I was overjoyed and felt that it would be a perfect fit,” Harris told Lit Hub. “When I created this painting I hoped to convey the deep desire to be free in all aspects as well as the desire for ultimate peace. I feel that those themes resonate with the Kindred sisters as they navigate the changes happening within themselves and the world around them.”
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