Crossing the River
Caryl Phillips’ deeply moving and brilliantly constructed narrative opens with the lament of an African father, driven by the failure of his crops to sell his three children into slavery in a moment of “desperate foolishness.” Following his heart-breaking confession comes a chorus of voices of the lost children of Africa who are “sinking hopeful roots into difficult soil.” Voices lifted over two hundred and fifty years of history include Nash Williams, a freed slave who moves to Liberia in the 1830s to work as a missionary; Martha Randolph, an elderly woman who embarks on an arduous journey to California after the Civil War in search of her long-lost daughter; and Travis, a black G.I. who falls in love with an English shopgirl while stationed in Yorkshire during World War II. Through these stories of the African diaspora, Phillips explores issues of identity, displacement, and the lasting legacy of slavery.
