The Wages — Fanny Howe

Fiction. "Fanny Howe's novel [based on a true story] has the clarity and concision and the narrative force of a fable... And like all good fables, it's endlessly complicated, a deceptively simple story wrapped in racial, historical, and economic ironies...It tells us that America's originating sin is the profit-making entanglement of race and slavery, whose tainted return, both economic and spiritual, is still being paid out today."--Russell Banks