Don't Fear The Reaper, Part I

I've been in every building that's ever held a dead body. I say this not to impress you. I say it because it's the only context I have for what comes next. In September of 1947, in the back of Bethany Baptist Church on West Market Street in Newark, New Jersey, a six-year-old girl named Amanda McKie looked directly at me and asked my name. I didn't have one. She gave me one anyway. She called me James. DON'T FEAR THE REAPER, PART I follows Death - now James - as he bears witness to eighty years of the McKie-Moreland family across Newark's streets, sanctuaries, and sorrow. From the postwar forties through the turbulent decades that followed, James watches with the attention of someone who already knows how every room resolves - and finds himself, for the first time, unable to look away. A multigenerational literary saga narrated by Death himself, Don't Fear the Reaper is a love letter to Newark, to Black family, and to the peculiar grief of outliving everyone you've learned to see. Part I spans 1947-1980. Part II follows. Fans of Lincoln in the Bardo and Homegoing will find themselves at home here.