Belle City

This interracial, intergenerational saga of love, land and loss is told from the disparate perspectives of Ruth Thatcher, who is Black, and Jonas Thatcher, who is White, and spans nearly a century.  The story, told in three parts, begins in Carrie’s Crossing, Georgia, in 1917 on the eve of World War I, when Ruth and Jonas first meet as 12-year-old farm children, and ends in 2005 as their descendants struggle to unravel and understand the legacies of this star-crossed pair. Ruth and Jonas have left behind them two astounding wills and a century of oral and written family history to tell the stories of their respective families against the backdrop of Reconstruction, the Ku Klux Klan, two World Wars, Jim Crow, the Great Migration, and the Jazz Age, segueing ultimately into the strange new digital world of the Twenty-First Century. During the course of their two lifetimes, Ruth and Jonas—and their respective families—have evolved, and ultimately have prospered, but it is left for their descendants to come to grips with the long-unacknowledged truth that the two families are actually one.