Whittle

When African American Chicago wood sculptor William Walker Whittington V-known simply as Whittle-unexpectedly inherits land in rural Louisiana, he believes he is receiving little more than a complicated legal obligation. What he uncovers instead is a buried family history that forces him to confront questions of race, art, ownership, and belonging-and alters the course of his life. The property, Mayhaw Plantation, is bound to a painful legacy: Whittle's great-grandmother, Mémé, was sold into servitude there as an infant. As Whittle returns to the land, he is drawn into the lives of those who still live and work it-a fiercely creative Creole artist and her chef brother; their extended family of farmers and musicians; and an unlikely young white cousin whose loyalty and vulnerability challenge Whittle's assumptions about family, inheritance, and race. As tensions erupt-culminating in acts of racial terror and attempted destruction-Whittle turns to what he knows best: carving, shaping, and transforming raw material into meaning. His sculpture becomes a reckoning, and ultimately an act of reclamation. What begins as an inheritance of land becomes an inheritance of belonging.