CAROLINA BUILT

A fictional biography of one of North Carolina’s first female African American real estate entrepreneurs.

Josephine Leary’s home life is at the center of this novel, while her real estate investment business is conducted mainly offstage. The main conflict is with her husband, Archer, aka Sweety, making for a somewhat pedestrian tale of occasional domestic strife. Although he seemed to appreciate Jo’s business acumen before they married, Sweety needles her about her work outside the home, which is, at first, mainly in their family business, a barbershop in Edenton, North Carolina. Sweety resents the fact that Jo has her own money—derived from income properties she began buying with a wedding gift of $500 from her father, a White former Confederate officer—and when she spends it on their family, for example buying a new buggy, buying their rental house, and buying their barbershop, he feels shamed as a man. Which does not prevent him, as Josephine’s first-person narration reminds us often, from splurging on expensive whisky. Jo, her grandmother, mother, and brother were all formerly enslaved on plantations in North Carolina. Now (the narrative spans the 1870s to the early 1890s), they are all doing well in Edenton, a prosperous community that appears relatively free of racial strife. Jo is never fazed by the racism she does encounter, not to mention the sexism. A White seller refuses to deal with her on her first property purchase, until "his greed outweighs his prejudice." She dismisses racial slurs by White women as a product of poor upbringing. The worst racist aggression—three drunken former Confederates disrupt church Juneteenth festivities with a wagonload of rotten tomatoes—is investigated by the local sheriff only at the behest of Sweety, who passes for White. Although Jo’s achievements are certainly worthy of being celebrated, her relatively obstacle-free path to prosperity, as well as her fictional doppelgänger’s total lack of vulnerability, saps the narrative of tension. We’re left with a pleasant panorama of middle-class small-town life in the late 19th century.

A heroine who plays the hand she’s dealt—nothing more, nothing less.