Princes of the Road is centered around the lives of members of The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the Pullman Porters. Most of its action takes place during the years 1938 - 40. By focusing on a limited number of porters (despite a cast of almost 90 characters, both fictional and historical), the novel explores the inner lives of the porters, their myriad personal strengths and failures, their common efforts, struggles with each other and the Pullman company, the penetration of every aspect of their lives by the effects of race, and the horrors - both domestic and foreign - endemic in those middle years of the 20th century. Using trains as both metaphors and dramatic instruments of transportation, it traverses the whole country, from the big cities to the smallest hamlets, North and South, East and West, from the Rockies to the Gulf Coast, from New England to the beaches of Southern California, and into the railroad hub of Chicago, home of the Pullman Company.  By entering the lives of individual porters, it exposes the reader to how such historical figures as Father Divine, A. Philip Randolph, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Madame C.J. Walker got there, too, making substantive impacts both on how they lived, and how they understood themselves. Princes of the Road is a historical novel which does not seek to evade, cloak, or minimize the horrors that much of the country s history has visited upon the least of these. It does this, as the poet Eugene Redmond has said of it, with rich storytelling, and memorably drawn lives, times, and rhymes that hold us like a spell.

Princes of the Road

David Covin

Blue Nile Press

Princes of the Road is centered around the lives of members of The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the Pullman Porters. Most of its action takes place during the years 1938 - 40. By focusing on a limited number of porters (despite a cast of almost 90 characters, both fictional and historical), the novel explores the inner lives of the porters, their myriad personal strengths and failures, their common efforts, struggles with each other and the Pullman company, the penetration of every aspect of their lives by the effects of race, and the horrors - both domestic and foreign - endemic in those middle years of the 20th century. Using trains as both metaphors and dramatic instruments of transportation, it traverses the whole country, from the big cities to the smallest hamlets, North and South, East and West, from the Rockies to the Gulf Coast, from New England to the beaches of Southern California, and into the railroad hub of Chicago, home of the Pullman Company. By entering the lives of individual porters, it exposes the reader to how such historical figures as Father Divine, A. Philip Randolph, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Madame C.J. Walker got there, too, making substantive impacts both on how they lived, and how they understood themselves. Princes of the Road is a historical novel which does not seek to evade, cloak, or minimize the horrors that much of the country s history has visited upon the least of these. It does this, as the poet Eugene Redmond has said of it, with rich storytelling, and memorably drawn lives, times, and rhymes that hold us like a spell.

Seaside Stories is a collection of short stories based in Seaside, California's small Black population during the 1950's. It is centered around the family of a strong and enterprising Black minister, and particularly, the close but tumultuous relationship with his older son.

Seaside Stories

S. R. Martin Jr.

Wimbey's Corner is a novel centered in Evanston and Chicago, Illinois during the early 1940s. Most of its characters reside in Wimbey's Corner, a small Black neighborhood owned by Eskeridge Wimbey, a wealthy Black man. The book's principal characters are Eskeridge Wimbey; Wayne Hunter, who moved to Chicago from Kentucky; Mackenzie Sweet, who aspires to be the world's oldest Negro; Claude Bonfils, a prince of Chicago pimps; Electra Wenders, a single mother; and Tommy Brown, a sailor. Much of the book's tension arises from the question of whether Wayne is the right kind of resident for the corner, and how that question plays out in the lives of the principal characters and other residents of Evanston and Chicago during WWII.

Wimbey's Corner

Prodigal is set in the mean street's of Chicago's Soouthside and the gritty streets of an urban Brazilian favela. It is a moving historical allegory of African prodigals stranded in North and South America by the Transatlantic slave trade, and an inspiring chronicle of moral grown and a homeward trajectory of the prodigal axe' of Brazilian Candomble'.

Prodigal

Summer 1937 wasn t going to be a typical summer for Etta and her older sister, Becca because their older brother Charlie was returning home from college after two years. Papa has a new car, Becca s going away to college and Etta is turning 15. The threats of thunder storms which plague the mid-west have blown over, the air is filled with childhood fun until one fateful day when innocence is lost and the family, Mama, Papa, Charlie, Becca, and especially Etta, will never be the same. The Summer of my Fifteenth Year is a gripping, tightly written novel by Geri Spencer Hunter.

The Summer of my Fifteenth Year

Geri Spencer Hunter

Frederick Foote s stories chart the geography of the African-American experience of his generation, tracing the uprootedness of the Black migration and the groundedness of characters who stake their claims. His protagonists are buffeted by the currents of Jim Crow, war, and discrimination, but these men and women retain their personhood and amazingly, thankfully, their sense of humor. The story Guest in Black and White frames the book and calls upon the ancestors to be with us as we read. Like a chant to the Yoruba deity, Elegua, the story opens the door to what is to come, reminding us of what has been at stake for Black men, and allowing the wisdom of the grandfathers to guide us. William Faulkner s Yoknapatawpha County has nothing on Fred Foote s Sumter, South Carolina. This is the deep background setting for the Andrew stories in this collection. It is a place where mules and men kick back when beaten. Sumter is the place of secrets and the wellspring of both pain and family connectedness. Travel there to see the same story through multiple perspectives, one of Frederick s authorial obsessions, to discover that the truth is elusive and situated in our faulty and self-protective memories. Next, we move forward to a cluster of enlistment stories, as young men, full of the wildness of their age, are lured by the promise of the military to travel, to escape, and to participate in the great American tableau of war at home and abroad. When our characters Teofilo and his buddies are off duty in North Philly, they jostle for a place to experience manhood and friendship. And when they must fight, they do so in all the theatres of combat of Frederick s times: Korea, Vietnam, and the homefront. These are stories of bloodletting, standoffs, and uneasy homecomings. The world of work for the young, gifted, and Black generation holds out terrible irony. Stories like The Appointment written with the gimlet eye of someone who s been there take us into the landscape of affirmative action, where opportunities come laced with land mines. These are stories of powerful men and women, sexual appetites, the edge of violence, and the cool control of brinkmanship. We can trace the roots of these human drives back into the mythic pasts of the characters and pull the thread through to our contemporary moment.

For the Sake of Soul

Frederick K. Foote Jr.

This is a coming of age novel of a Black girl, Ruth-Ann Weathering, born in Mandarin Florida in 1900. It traces events from 1913 - 1920.

Raisins in Milk

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Books by Blue Nile Press

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Blue Nile Press publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Princes of the Road

Princes of the Road

Seaside Stories

Wimbey's Corner

Prodigal

The Summer of my Fifteenth Year

For the Sake of Soul

Raisins in Milk