Description

The Hurston-Wright Award Finalist makes her long-awaited return with this electrifying saga-as moving and indelible as The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, The Turner House, and The Love Songs of W. E. B. DuBois-that explores three generations of a family trying to overcome trials and trauma and free themselves from the darkness of the past.

Lottie Rebecca Lee is spoken into the world in Fayetteville, North Carolina by a Black nurse who declares, “Lord Jesus, if that ain’t the blackest little baby born this side of heaven.” Later, Lottie will prove that she is the ancestors’ promise to unearth the Mississippi and Ghanaian atrocities that have tormented Benjamin Lee, her grandfather who was born during the Great Depression in Mississippi’s red clay tobacco fields, and Benjamin Junior, his son and Lottie Rebecca’s father, born in Fayetteville, North Carolina, where the post Korean War GI Bill promises prosperity. These two generations of men are haunted by the Mother-Spirit who did not survive enslavement’s post-traumatic stress violence. Trinity is the riveting story of the daughter-spirit born to stitch love back into the scattered wombs of her Black mothers and call love back into the fishing blues songs of her Black male kin. Lottie Rebecca Lee is the Divine spirited daughter born to set everything back up right again, in this daringly original novel.

Publisher Review

“If we are ancestrally haunted, we may also be ancestrally healed. This is the lesson of Zelda Lockhart’s Trinity, an epic, vivid and heart-wrenching novel. Reminiscent of the work of Gayl Jones and Alice Walker, Lockhart breathes life into the landscape and gives us Black history through characters you will never forget. Beautiful.”
– Imani Perry, author of the New York Times bestseller South to America

“The ancients who said there was something about the number three were right. Trinity rises up alongside The Third Life of Grange Copeland and teaches us about redemption, interconnection, and dignity. May we all have descendants as bold as Zelda Lockhart and the characters she creates to heal what we could not heal. May we all BE legacy bearers as willing as Zelda so that we may honor those who left us everything.”
– Alexis Pauline Gumbs, PhD, author of Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals

“Trinity pulses with the very best in Southern spirit-writing. The characters have this way of floating beneath the plot, right above the dirt in a place that is equally rich as it is terrifying. I am forever changed by what Zelda Lockhart has made.”
– Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy: An American Memoir