![]() ![]() I’ve written my own story, sourced it from the air. “The power of imagination is very strong. “What did it feel like to be these people in this time in history?” Harris asks. Realizing how little he knew about the period in American history right after emancipation, Harris says he started thinking about the repercussions of the enslaved suddenly becoming free, and what that freedom meant when there were no guidelines to help navigate the change. “All Black writers are drawn to filling in their past,” he says. In his debut novel, The Sweetness of Water, Harris creates that missing history through the story of two brothers, Prentiss and Landry, who are freed by the Emancipation Proclamation and hired to work on the Georgia farm of George and Isabelle Walker, whose only son died as a soldier in the Civil War. Nathan Harris’s father was obsessed with researching his family history, but when Harris asked what he’d discovered, the answer was almost nothing-a common situation for many Black Americans. ![]()
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