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by Kavi Ocktiiv (Author)
Louisiana, 1851.
The South is a country of locked doors and sharp silences, and some silences are held in place with blood.
Shadows opens on the Magnolia Parish Plantation, where the architecture of domination is maintained not only by law and labor, but by the specific, practiced violence of who understand that the most effective terror is the kind no one will speak of afterward.
But the plantation is not the whole world. Beyond its manicured perimeter, another America breathes, moves, and conspires... one that the history books have worked diligently to keep invisible.
This is the world of Black Native America.
The world of the Black Seminoles... Afro-Indigenous peoples of ancient America, born of alliance and survival and refusal. The world where warriors like Osceola held the United States Army at bay for forty years in the swamps and hammocks of Florida. Where John Horse; war captain, diplomat, and one of the most consequential figures of nineteenth-century resistance, led his people through fire and negotiation and exile, always moving toward freedom. Known to the world only as Amos, Amosohele' carried in his bones both the wound and the forbidden knowledge of a people who were never meant to survive, let alone remember their own names.
Shadows in the Magnolias is a novel about the price of remaining human in a nation that insisted on castration of dignity and reduction of humans to property. It follows characters caught between worlds: those who serve, those who resist, those who are yet to choose as the Second Seminole War reshapes the continent and the domestic slave trade tears apart everything that was not already burning.
It is also a novel about erasure.
About the Walter Ashby Pleckers of the world who legislated Indigenous identity out of existence. About the Trail of Tears that carried more than one face. About Black Native Americans who were reclassified, renamed, displaced, and written out of the American story so completely that even their absence became normalized.
This work refuses that forgetting.
