Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award
"The
Chaneysville Incident rivals Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon as
the best novel about the black experience in America since Ellison's Invisible
Man." -- Christian Science
Monitor
The legends say something happened in
Chaneysville.
The Chaneysville Incident is the
powerful story of one man's obsession with discovering what that something
was a quest that takes the brilliant and bitter young Black historian John
Washington back through the secrets and buried evil of his heritage.
Returning home to care for and then bury his
father's closest friend and his own guardian, Old Jack Crawley, John comes upon
the scant records of his family's proud and tragic history, which he drives
himself to reconstruct and accept. This is the story of John's relationship
with his family, the town, and the woman he loves; and also between the past
and the present, between oppression and guilt, hate and violence, love and
acceptance.