10 Black Historical Fiction Books to Read Next
Historical fiction by Black women tends to go where the textbooks stop. Textbooks give you the dates and the treaties. These novels tell you who was in the kitchen, who was in the jail, and who was expected to keep quiet about it.
These ten span a resort in Ohio where slaveholders brought the women they enslaved, a Richmond jail run for profit, a Philadelphia home for unwed mothers, and a Chicago jazz club in 1925. Several are based on real people and real cases, and the notes at the back are worth reading too.
Wench
An Ohio summer resort in the 1850s where Southern slaveholders vacationed with the enslaved women they called mistresses, on free soil, where escape was technically possible. Based on a real place. The friendships between the four women carry it.
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Take My Hand
Alabama, 1973. A young Black nurse takes a job at a family planning clinic and finds two of her patients have been sterilized without consent. Drawn from the Relf sisters case, and it will make you angry in a useful way.
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Yellow Wife
Pheby was promised freedom on her eighteenth birthday and ends up instead at a Richmond jail that traded in human beings. What she does to keep her children alive is the whole book, and Johnson does not let you judge her from a distance.
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The House of Eve
Two women in the 1950s: a Philadelphia teenager whose pregnancy derails her future, and a Howard student trying to marry into the Black elite. Their stories converge in a way you will see coming and still feel.
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The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois
Eight hundred pages tracking one Georgia family from the Creek and Cherokee land it started on through slavery, Reconstruction, and a present-day graduate student sorting the records. Long on purpose. Clear your calendar.
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Conjure Women
A midwife and healer on a Southern plantation, told across the years before and after emancipation, when freedom arrives and the people who need her still need her. Atakora writes superstition and medicine as the same skill.
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Libertie
Free-born in Reconstruction Brooklyn, Libertie is expected to become a doctor like her mother and does not want to. She marries and moves to Haiti instead. A novel about a daughter refusing the life she was handed.
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Washington Black
An eleven-year-old on a Barbados sugar plantation is chosen as assistant to his master's brother, an eccentric scientist, and escapes by hot air balloon. It goes stranger and further than that. Won the Giller Prize.
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Wild Women and the Blues
Black Chicago in 1925, chorus girls and speakeasies and a filmmaker with secrets, cut against a film student in 2015 interviewing the last woman who was there. The jazz age from inside the Stroll.
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The Book of Harlan
A Harlem Renaissance musician takes a gig in Paris in 1939 and ends up in a Nazi concentration camp, a piece of Black history most novels skip entirely. McFadden moves fast and does not soften the landing.
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