The Peach Seed

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A multigenerational novel and an epic debut that explores the origins of a south Georgia family's tradition and how its modern-day sons and daughters struggle with the legacies of America's Civil Rights Movement and the far-reaching impacts of the 1800s slave trade from Senegal to Charleston, SC.On a routine day, Fletcher Dukes drives his older sister, Olga, who is losing her sight, to do weekly grocery shopping at the Piggly Wiggly. On the liquor aisle, they pass a tall woman, head bowed reading a wine label. Fletcher smells her perfume first, then sees a strawberry birthmark on the nape of the woman's neck and knows at once that this is his lost love, Altovise Benson. Fletcher and Altovise risked their lives together in sit-ins and marches, but their plan to marry was interrupted when the police turned a peaceful protest violent. The two were jailed in different towns leading to a separation that would ultimately span 52 years. Before Altovise's departure, Fletcher carves her a peach seed monkey with diamond eyes. As we learn via harrowing flashbacks to 1800's Senegal, an undiscovered Dukes ancestor who was sold into slavery carved the first monkey-the Peach Seed Monkey that forms the talismanic tradition, the rite of passage, that each generation of Dukes man gifts to his son on his 13th birthday-along with the tools and knowledge to carve them himself. By giving one to Altovise, Fletcher initiates a physical and spiritual break in a tradition that-like the Civil Rights Movement-irrevocably shapes the lives of future generations including Fletcher's daughters, his grandson, Bo-D and a constellation of Dukes in the present.