BLACK CHEROKEE

A mixed-race girl comes of age in South Carolina communities leery of accepting her.

“You’re half-Black, half-Cherokee, and all mixed up,” says Blue, the grandmother of Ophelia, the protagonist of Downing’s debut novel. Opening in 1993, when Ophelia is 7, and following her to 2005 and her early adulthood, the novel tracks her in three milieus. The first is Etsi, a town where Blue teaches Ophelia Cherokee lore on what was a former reservation. Later, she moves in with her aunt in Stone River, a predominantly Black community, where she’s treated by her Black cousins and classmates as a misfit—bookish, quiet, and overly proud of her suspect Native heritage. An escape hatch seems to appear in the form of La Belle École, a school designed for gifted Black children, but that puts Ophelia into the orbit of a predominantly white high-school culture that largely shuns her as well. More precisely, it introduces her to the Beauregard clan, a white farming family that’s ruled much of the region’s economy—and poisoned the river in Etsi. As studies of racial divisions, Downing’s conflicts can feel tidily straightforward at times, which makes Ophelia’s sense of being out of place feel repetitive; the final conflict involves a familiar trope, and a magical-realist gesture isn’t persuasive. But if Ophelia’s path is bluntly allegorical, the novel is enlivened by its secondary characters, particularly Blue and Belle, the founder of La Belle École, both hard-charging and no-nonsense types. Downing’s story opens up questions about how much separate racial communities can intermingle while still preserving their identities, and shows how those overlaps can prompt power struggles, sometimes vicious ones. But it lacks a strong, surprising character at its center.

An earnest if not entirely successful tale of generations-old social and racial divisions.