Contending Forces

Description

In response to the upcoming abolition of slavery in the British Empire, Charles Montfort, an English planter in Bermuda, decides to move his family (and his human chattel) to the southern United States in order to free his slaves on his own schedule. However, Montfort’s arrival arouses the jealousy and anger of his neighbors, who murder Montfort and capture his wife and sons as slaves.

Several decades later, Charles Montfort’s lineage survives in the Smiths, a family of Black Bostonians headed by the matriarch Ma Smith, who keeps a boarding house alongside her daughter Dora and her son Will. When a beautiful but mysterious woman of color named Sappho Clark arrives at the boarding house, Dora’s fiancé John P. Langley becomes infatuated with her and begins vying for her attentions alongside Will Smith. The contest of suitors takes place against the backdrop of persistent racial violence in the United States, revealing the painful histories of all of the parties involved.

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