Wade in the Water

August 1, 2022

In rural, segregated 1982 Ricksville, MS, a Black 11-year-old named Ella--smart but unwanted by family and town--befriends Ms. St. James, a white woman from Princeton there to do research. Ella needs Ms. St. James so desperately that she unintentionally pushes up against secrets from Ms. St. James's past, with terrible consequences. From U.S.-born, Ghana and Zimbabwe--raised Nkrumah.

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Starred review from November 7, 2022
Nkrumah’s stunning debut revolves around an unlikely friendship between an 11-year-old Black girl and a middle-aged white woman in 1982 Ricksville, Miss., and the segregated town’s fraught history. Intelligent, questioning Ella stands out in her light-skinned Black family because she is the result of her mother’s fling with a much darker-skinned man. Her ne’er-do-well stepfather Leroy is seldom home, but when he is, he takes out his rage and humiliation by sexually abusing Ella, while her mother treats her with contempt and frequent whippings. Meanwhile, a white Princeton University professor named Katherine St. James, who was raised in Mississippi, stirs things up when she moves into the Black half of town for a research project. Though it’s been almost 20 years since the killings of three voting-rights activists nearby, the case remains unsolved and racial tensions still run high. Against this backdrop, Katherine becomes a tutor and mother figure to the love-starved Ella, but as shocking revelations emerge about Katherine’s past in 1960s Mississippi, Nkrumah leads readers to reflect on the limits of the professor’s good intentions. The author is supremely gifted at bringing both her characters and their close-knit rural town to life. Readers will eagerly await more from this writer. Agent: Charlotte Sheedy, Charlotte Sheedy Literary.

November 1, 2022
Nkrumah's first novel features coprotagonists Ella, a 12-year-old Black girl living in Ricksville, Mississippi, in 1982, and Katherine St. James, a white Princeton graduate student in 1981. Ella is hated by her mother as a living reminder of a secret affair. As for Katherine, in flashbacks readers see her growing up on a farm in nearby Philadelphia, Mississippi, in the early 1960s. Her father, a dedicated Klan member, brainwashes her to hate Black people, as he does--in fact, he is the ringleader of a gang that murders three civil rights workers in 1964. Flash forward 20 years: a now-thirtysomething Katherine comes to Ricksville, where she moves to the town's Black neighborhood, hoping to interview its residents for her thesis. There she meets Ella, and the two become friends. The novel comes dangerously close to melodrama at times, and there are some inconsistencies in characterization. Otherwise, though, it effectively dramatizes the realities of Black life in the South in the 1980s and the uneasy relationship that existed then between the races.

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February 15, 2023
In 1982, a White stranger comes to a Black rural town to research the aftermath of the civil rights movement--while concealing her own connection to it. Twelve-year-old Ella is by far the darkest-skinned person in her family, and everyone in Ricksville, Mississippi, knows it's because she is not the daughter of her mother's footloose husband, Leroy. Leroy abuses her emotionally, physically, and sexually whenever he's in town and even forbids her siblings from treating her as family. With her only ally an old, blind man named Mr. Macabe, she falls easily into an unusual friendship with newcomer Katherine St. James, a Princeton graduate student. St. James used to be Kate Summerville, daughter of a notorious Mississippi Ku Klux Klan leader who fled North with his family in the 1960s to escape justice. He went on to commit another horrific act in Boston, driving his daughter over the brink of sanity. After a stint in a mental institution, Kate emerged with a new name and a vow to devote herself to the academic study of the civil rights movement. When a Black Princeton professor warns her that she's "shut the door on a cupboard full of hate" and that unless she does some real cleaning, "some of that hate's going to come crawling out," she decides to return to Mississippi and base her research there, though she goes by her changed name and does not acknowledge her roots. Either way, nobody wants a thing to do with her except poor ostracized Ella, and the story proceeds, sometimes slowly, sometimes wildly and melodramatically, from there. What looks like it could be a narrative of atonement and redemption is turned completely on its head in the final chapters, as more details on Katherine's involvement with her father are presented--some to the community, some only to the reader. Nkrumah seems to agree with Faulkner, who said, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." She leaves us without resolution on the fate of the would-be White savior but gives Ella some of the experience of fatherly love she craves, both emotionally and spiritually. A furious look at the long tail of Jim Crow, with lively writing and a well-drawn setting. A promising debut.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

January 13, 2023

DEBUT Set in Ricksville, MS, a small rural town still gripped by racial divisions in 1982, this debut novel draws heavily upon Mississippi's sordid past of social injustice and racist violence. Ella, an 11-year-old Black girl, dominates the story. The darkest-skinned child among her siblings and child of her mother's affair with someone other than her shiftless, abusive stepfather, Ella is the target of her family's hatred and neglect. She shares a complex narrative space with Katherine St. James, a white woman who has moved from Princeton to live among Ricksville's Black community, explaining that she is doing graduate research on the impact of the civil rights movement on both Black and white Americans. Katherine befriends young Ella, and their mentor relationship badly impacts Ella's already shaky status within her community. As Ella pushes to know more of the white woman's past and the motivations for her research, secrets emerge that threaten to sunder their connection. VERDICT With expert character development, Nkrumah gives memorable voice to a young woman struggling to overcome familial abuse and find her way in the world. A strength of this novel is how sharply different Katherine's portrayal is compared with white characters in novels like Kathryn Stockett's The Help. For readers who enjoyed Alice Walker's Meridian and Jas Hammonds's YA novel We Deserve Monuments.--Faye A. Chadwell

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