Griggs frames this, his second novel, with an image from his preface: a grain of corn struggling for light and nourishment in the shade of a great oak — the oak being Anglo-Saxon America, the grain the Black citizen trying to live under it. In Richmond, Virginia, Erma Wysong and Astral Herndon, childhood friends from the emerging Black middle class, go off to college — Erma to Tuskegee — with hopes their parents never had. Astral loves Erma and plans to return successful enough to marry her, but their courtship is shadowed by the secret of Erma's parentage: raised by Black parents, she was born to a white father, a fact that feeds doubt, gossip, and tragedy around them. Mixing romance, melodrama, and political argument, Overshadowed examines race, gender, color, and assimilation, and critiques both white liberal hypocrisy — embodied in the ironically named Horace Christian — and the costs of imitating it.
Author: Sutton E. Griggs · Original publisher: The Orion Publishing Co. (Nashville, Tennessee), 1901