The Hurston-Wright Award finalist makes her long-awaited return with this electrifying saga—as moving and indelible as The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, The Turner House, and The Love Songs of W. E. B. DuBois—that explores three generations of a family trying to overcome trials and trauma and free themselves from the darkness of the past.“If we are ancestrally haunted, we may also be ancestrally healed. This is the lesson of Zelda Lockhart’s Trinity, an epic, vivid and heart-wrenching novel. Reminiscent of the work of Gayl Jones and Alice Walker, Lockhart breathes life into the landscape and gives us Black history through characters you will never forget. Beautiful.”—Imani Perry, author of South to America

Lottie Rebecca Lee is spoken into this world in Fayetteville, North Carolina, by a Black nurse who declares, “Lord Jesus, if that ain’t the blackest little baby born this side of heaven.” Later, her schoolmates chant “Tar Baby.” What they do not understand, she eventually proves: she is the ancestors’ promise to unearth the Mississippi and Ghanaian atrocities that have held them all in a place of torment. This includes her grandfather Benjamin Lee, who was born during the Great Depression among the red clay tobacco fields of Mississippi, and his son, Benjamin Junior (Lottie Rebecca’s father), born in Fayetteville amidst the post–Korean War GI Bill promises of prosperity. These two generations of Black men are haunted by the mother-spirit who did not survive their post-traumatic stress violence. Trinity is the tale of the daughter-spirit born in the late seventies to a son struggling to tame the invasive choking vines of Vietnam War flashbacks. She will stitch love back into the fragmented scattered wombs of her Black mothers and call love back into the fishing blues songs of her Black male kin. Lottie Rebecca Lee is the Divine-spirited daughter born to set things back upright again.