"Well Then, Carry On": Piercing Recalcitrant History in LaShonda Katrice Barnett's Jam on the Vine

The regime of Jim Crow segregation that began coalescing in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century can be read in large part as a vicious and systematic response to the development of an African American middle class, one that was accruing a notable measure of economic stability, political consciousness, and an emergent sense of both national and transnational identity. According to Grace Elizabeth Hale, "whites responded to this increasing diversity and this rising black middle class with fear, violent reprisals, and state legislation. … Whites created the culture of segregation in large part to counter black success, to make a myth of absolute racial difference, to stop the rising" (21). Coincident with—and intrinsic to—the evolution of American apartheid, the United States was developing a mass-culture industry reliant in no small part on the "representations, re-creations, and reproductions of black voices, black bodies, and black culture" at the same time that it was also becoming "the predominant industrial power of the world and an international power with colonial possessions" (Smethurst 6). In her deeply researched and richly detailed 2015 debut novel, Jam on the Vine, LaShonda Katrice Barnett vivifies this fraught matrix of deepening Jim Crow repression and rising African American modernity through the experiences of her lesbian protagonist, Ivoe Williams, a newspaperwoman whose prose and politics become ever more insistent as her story unfolds.

Jam on the Vine follows Ivoe's life from 1897 through 1925. The novel opens in Central East Texas, just a year after the Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) decision guaranteed the deepening and expansion of segregation across the United States. In 1916, Ivoe and her family join the Great Migration and move to Kansas City. By the novel's conclusion, which is set in Paris during a Pan-African Congress, Ivoe has developed not only a national perspective on race in America but also a transnational consciousness and an unshakable dedication to challenging white supremacy. Spanning the years between Plessy and the advent of the Harlem Renaissance, Jam on the Vine charts Ivoe's development from a voracious young reader who is limited by race and geography into an outspoken journalist brave enough to struggle against legal segregation, extralegal violence, and the rise of the prison-industrial complex. Following the advice of her same-sex partner, Ona Durden, Ivoe commits to contesting the fictions, fantasies, and brutal realities of Jim Crow modernity in early twentieth-century America.

Barnett was an accomplished and well-received writer before the release of her first novel. In 1999, for example, she published a collection of short stories titled Callaloo and Other Lesbian Love Tales, and in 2007, she produced an anthology of interviews, I Got Thunder: Black Women Songwriters on Their Craft. Anticipating the loving, supportive lesbian relationship at the heart of Jam on the Vine, the stories in Callaloo celebrate "all our ways of loving" by dramatizing the various experiences of often unheard lesbian perspectives. For I Got Thunder, Barnett interviewed twenty black female singer-songwriters, including such luminaries as Abbey Lincoln, Nina Simone, and Dionne Warwick ("LaShonda"). Appraisals of Jam on the Vine on its publication were almost universally positive, and critics were especially grateful for Barnett's attention to an era that has yet to attract adequate fictional treatment. Publishers Weekly praised "[t]his wonderful debut novel" for its vibrant, fully realized vision of the shadowy corners of America's history" ("Jam"), and the Chicago Tribune hailed Jam on the Vine as "fresh, and original [as it] time-travels to an undiscovered past" (Taylor).

The novel's rich depiction of a "shadowy corner" of history is no accident. Having earned a PhD in American Studies from the College of William and Mary in 2012 and an MA in Women's History from Sarah Lawrence College in 1998, Barnett is a trained historian who brings her research skills to bear on every page. In a 2015 interview, she explains: "African-American history is so rife with really important information that most people never know. And when I say most...