From Journey Prize-winning author Zilla Jones comes a collection of short stories exploring the lives of Black Canadian women from 1730s to the present day. As they wrestle with history's traumatic legacies, they move forward with hope, resilience, and joy.
Six linked short stories chronicle an alternative history of Marie-Joseph Angélique, an enslaved woman accused of setting fire to Montréal in 1734. Other historical tales feature Angélique's fictional mother, an Ashanti woman captured by the Portuguese; Africville, Nova Scotia, at its founding in the 1850s and at its destruction a century later; and Chloe Cooley's kidnapping in Upper Canada by American slave catchers. The inheritors of Angélique's resistance, modern day women, girls, mothers, and daughters, struggle to relate to one another and find their place in the world. A young mixed-race girl seeks belonging in an exclusive private school. A woman in a failing marriage visits the slave forts in Ghana. Women in police custody resist the inhumanities of the criminal justice system.
In an ongoing dialogue between past and present generations, where historic figures share space with their descendants, So Much to Tell provokes questions about memory, truth, and the recording of history.