The Color
of Us

In the summer of 1980, seventeen-year-old Sarah Silvers walks into a party in Asheville and out of the only life her family will forgive. The son she carries home to a rented room she names Ishmael — for the boy in her mother's Bible who was sent into the wilderness with nothing but his mother's hand.

Eight years later she marries a man who adopts Ishmael as his own and gives her a second son. For a while it is almost a family. Then Davenport Morgan comes home from prison with a box of pamphlets and a new certainty about what the world owes him, and Sarah starts keeping a notebook hidden in the laundry room.

The night she finally runs, she can take only one child.

Twenty-nine years later, five young people are dead in Bellwether County, North Carolina. The lawyer for their families sits down across a conference table from the lawyer for the county, and the two men recognize each other. Ishmael Silvers has built a career forcing institutions to say what they did. Isaac Morgan has built one saying it in language no one can be blamed for. They have not spoken since childhood. Between them, still sealed, is a letter their mother wrote before she died.

The Color of Us runs from a Winn-Dixie loading dock in 1980 to a federal courtroom in 2024 — through an adoption, a burglary, a snowstorm, eight minutes and eleven seconds of audio, and a cemetery gate at one in the morning. It is a novel about the moment a family breaks along a line the country drew first, and about what it costs two men to find their way back across it.

For readers of The Vanishing Half, Take My Hand, and Razorblade Tears.