Coleman Hill
A fictionalized family saga, or in the author’s preferred term, a biomythography, Coleman Hill travels through several generations of the Coleman family, beginning in the American Deep South of the 1910s and ending in 1989 New Jersey, with a short junket to Brooklyn. It is a new history of ordinary Black Americans, one with the power that only fine fiction can wield, about Black sharecroppers who moved to the Northern suburbs alongside the Great Migration moving north to the great cities. People who left lynchings and total segregation behind to find their Northern lives a dead-end, the women working as domestics, the men as low-paid factory workers, the children’s aspirations less fulfilled than their Southern cousins’. Generational trauma and pain are palpable in the abuse and violence some of the elders show one another and their children, but so is the intergenerational love and resilience, as this Coleman family member, the author, records their humanity.
Kim Coleman Foote writes so bravely and naturally about the lives of people who happen to be her ancestors and relatives, the reader never questions the truth of this fiction, as this historical novel draws the reader in on the first page and does not let go. Coleman Hill teaches as much as it touches the heart, and after reading it once, the desire to reread this amazing work follows.
