The author of the award-winning Sally Hemings now brings to life Hannah Elias, one of the richest black women in America in the early 1900s, in this mesmerizing novel swirling with atmosphere and steeped in history.A murder and a case of mistaken identity brings the police to Hannah Elias' glitzy, five-story, twenty-room mansion on Central Park West. This is the beginning of an odyssey that moves back and forth in time and reveals the dangerous secrets of a mysterious woman, the fortune she built, and her precipitous fall.Born in Philadelphia in the late 1800s, Hannah Elias has done things she's not proud of to survive. Shedding her past, Hannah slips on a new identity before relocating to New York City to become as rich as a robber baron. Hannah quietly invests in the stock market, growing her fortune with the help of businessmen. As the money pours in, Hannah hides her millions across 29 banks. Finally attaining the life she's always...

Illuminating an enigma of the past, this is the provocative continuation of the irrefutable chronicle of Sally Hemings—Thomas Jefferson’s mistress, the mother of his children, and the slave he would never set free, even when the scandal nearly cost him the presidency. Epic in proportion yet rendered in exquisite detail, this controversial story begins in 1822, recounting the tale of Harriet Hemings, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings’ beautiful and headstrong slave daughter. Harriet is allowed to run away from Monticello and pass for white, as Jefferson had promised Sally their children would be able to do. Experiencing the turbulent events leading up to the American Civil War, Harriet eventually finds herself thrust into the very heart of the Battle of Gettysburg. Astonishing in its depiction of American history, this is an authentic and classic account of love and color in the United States. Includes a new reader's guide written especially for this edition.

The long breath of Barbara Chase-Riboud's poems recalls poets of the antique world we know only from fragments, like Sappho. And yet here is a disquieting and sumptuous contemporary voice that seems to gather up antiquity and modernity with equal fervor and scorn. These poems are sexually charged, possessed of a courtly disdain and a strange nobility that seems to well up from below to be self-creating and unlike the verse of any other poet writing today. Certainly one secret to this work is that Chase-Riboud's poems are informed by her epic, polished bronze sculptures, as her sculptures are informed by her narrative fiction, and her fiction by her poems. The idea of the Renaissance Man is almost a cliché, but how often do we get to see what it means for an artist to be a Renaissance Woman? Chase-Riboud has been a major in sculpture, fiction, and poetry for close to half a century: selling over a million copies of her path-breaking novel Sally Hemings in the...

Bringing to life one of the greatest and most controversial love stories, this fictional account reveals the beautiful and elusive Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson's mistress for 38 years whom he loved and lived with until he died. Adding to the scandal, she was a quadroon slave and Jefferson fathered a slave family whose descendants are alive today. In this novel, Jefferson and his mistress are fully realized, as are many of the other personages of the early Republic—Aaron Burr, Dolly and James Madison, John and Abigail Adams, and Sally's mother Elizabeth, who was Jefferson's father-in-law's mistress. This brilliant and highly acclaimed novel is a contemporary masterpiece—a poignant, tragic, and unforgettable meditation on the history of race and sex in America.