Long After We Are Gone 

By Terah Shelton Harris 

Sourcebooks, 2024 

Paperback 

Genre: Fiction 

Reviewed by Charlotte C. Teague 

 

Cover of Long After We Are Gone. Trees overlap along a path leading to a house in the background. The word “family” denotes strength, love, hope, memories, and often misunderstandings and pain. In Long After We Are Gone, author Terah Shelton Harris expounds on the meaning of this common word by sharing a story of four siblings struggling to battle their own personal demons against the backdrop of their father’s last words, “Don’t let the white man take the house.”  

Harris takes readers on a southern roots journey to meet Junior, Mance, Cecily (CeCe), and Angeline (Tokey) Solomon after the sudden death of their father, King Solomon, a hardworking carpenter who owned two hundred acres of land known as the Kingdom in the fictional town of Diggs, North Carolina. At first glance, this seems like a familiar story, but by moving through each chapter, one sees and is challenged by the atypical and complicated lives of this family.     

Not having known their mother, Hazel, the children were reared by their father in a home filled with love, expectations, and sometimes very harsh realities that led them all to live secret lives to cope with the dysfunction. Junior is a successful elementary school principal who is married with two young daughters, but he is in love with a man, and these innate feelings cause his inner and outer self to be at war. Mance is a skilled craftsman with an explosive temper, which is how he ends up in prison twice. Cecily (CeCe) is so determined to build a vastly different life from her childhood that she compromises all the values taught to her in the Kingdom by committing embezzlement while working as a successful New York City attorney. To mask her pain at the family’s predicament, Angeline (Tokey) succumbs to a food addiction to soothe her soul and her loneliness to the detriment of her health and emotional well-being. These burdens carried by the children become too heavy; they must lay them down and come to terms with the issues that plague them. This unburdening is the only way they can metaphorically carry their father’s hand-carved custom casket built by his sons. With the idea given in Hebrews, “…let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us…,” this family works through their individual problems and their grief connected to intergenerational trauma. They embrace forced change, truth, and each other, giving each of them hope and courage for the future. The huge choice they make as a family to fulfill their father’s dying plea is a brave sacrifice to set themselves free, and they triumph at the end of this intriguing and thought-provoking story.  

Because this novel is birthed from the tragedy of involuntary land loss for Blacks in the United States, the story of these siblings is even more important and relevant. The problems connected to heir property rights, unfair and flawed laws, and ambiguous policies associated with land ownership continue to be causes of land loss for many Black families. While this story is fiction, many stories of Black land loss are not. Terah Shelton Harris has created a compelling novel that reminds readers of this tragedy through richly crafted words, themes, and characters. Although the themes, characters, language, and plot are clearly in the Southern literary tradition of family, love, loss, trauma, dysfunction, and violence, they are here presented through the powerful, but often silenced lens of the exploited Black members of the culture. 

Charlotte C. Teague is associate professor of English at Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical University (AAMU) where she specializes in Professional Writing (Creative, Media, & Technical), Black Women Writers, and Protest Literature.