The Book of Judith

The Book of Judith begins where the surviving records do: with a woman whose life was reduced to fragments on paper.Virginia, circa sixteen forty. Judith lives in a world where freedom, family, land, and even a person's identity can be determined by law, circumstance, and the decisions of others. Yet behind the names and dates preserved in historical records lived a woman who loved, endured, protected her family, and helped begin a legacy that would survive for centuries.Drawing upon documented family history, Patricia A. Charity reimagines the human story between the surviving records, following Judith and the generations whose lives grew from hers. From bondage and the difficult road toward freedom to land ownership, family, love, loss, and the changing racial boundaries of early America, Judith's story reveals how ordinary people built lives within extraordinary circumstances.The Book of Judith is the first novel in the Where the Water Remembers series, a multigenerational journey through more than three centuries of one African American family's documented history.Some histories survive in official records.Others survive because someone remembers.And what was taken from paper was never taken from blood.