America had finally elected its first Black President, and for two terms at that. For a moment it looked like arrival. Then the moment passed, the community fractured, and a generation that had waited four hundred years for a seat at the table began to suspect the invitation was never coming at all.
So they stopped waiting for it.
It starts with a Congressional study nobody expects to matter - an inquiry into why Black America keeps falling behind, handed to a small team of Black public servants who take the question more seriously than anyone intended. What they return with is not a report. It is a plan.
Forty acres, claimed this time on their own terms. A city rising out of the Mississippi Delta where Mound Bayou has stood since 1887. A modern Timbuktu on the coast of Bahia. A forty-eight-story tower on the Gulf where a shipyard used to be. And, holding it together or pulling it apart, a handful of people who never asked to carry any of it: Darius, who is asked to lead before he is ready. T'Angela, who built her own empire while complementing her husband's calling. Imani and Malik, who agree on the destination and on nothing else. And Brad, the unlikely partner nobody in the room can agree about.
Spanning the Delta, the Gulf Coast and the Brazilian Atlantic, Uninvited asks a question this country has never answered honestly: what happens when a people decide that the table they were never seated at is one they can build for themselves?
A novel about self-determination, the cost of ambition, and the long walk from plight to purpose.
This combined edition previously published in two volumes as Uninvited: The Backstory to the "Black-Story" and Uninvited Too: Re-"Vision."