A historical family saga about racial passing, set against the art world. In the segregated South of 1931, Hank Whitaker's deathbed confession reveals to his white socialite wife Maggie and their son Lance that the successful businessman they knew was a Black man who had passed for white — making Maggie's marriage illegal and Lance's inheritance of identity suddenly precarious. After threats drive mother and son to Paris, the novel follows three generations among artists, expatriates, and collectors, weaving fictional figures together with real ones including Belle da Costa Greene, the Morgan Library director who herself passed. Sawyer, a former Smithsonian and Chrysler Museum administrator, uses collecting and attribution — a painting's provenance — as the governing metaphor for a family's hidden origin. The novel won the 2017 Maryland Writers' Association book award for historical fiction.
Author: Donna Drew Sawyer · Original publisher: Creative Cache (place not established), 2015