Promise: A Novel
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On Palm Sunday, April 5, 1936, a tornado devastated Tupelo, Mississippi. It killed more than 200 people, not counting an unknown number of black citizens, who were not included in the official casualty figures. In Promise, author Minrose Gwin explores this forgotten tragedy through the eyes of two women—one black, one white; one a great-grandmother, the other a teenager—as they fight for their families’ survival.
Dovey, a local laundress, is flung by the winds into a lake and nearly drowned. Yet she makes her way across Tupelo to find her husband, her sixteen-year-old granddaughter, and her great-grandson, Promise, a light-skinned baby boy. When she stops at the house of the despised McNabb family, she discovers that Jo, the McNabbs’ dutiful teenage daughter, has suffered a terrible head wound. And when Jo later discovers a baby in the wreckage, she is certain it is her baby brother and vows to protect him.
During the harrowing days that follow, Jo and Dovey struggle to navigate a landscape of disaster—as well as the haunting history that links them together. A story of loss, hope, despair, grit, courage, and race, Promise reminds us of the transformative power of facing our most troubled relations with one another.
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Minrose Gwin is the author of three novels: The Queen of Palmyra, Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick and finalist for the John Gardner Fiction Book Award; Promise, finalist for the Willie Morris Award in Southern Literature; and The Accidentals. In her memoir, Wishing for Snow, she writes about the convergence of poetry and psychosis in her mother’s life. Wearing another hat, she has written four books of literary and cultural criticism and history, most recently Remembering Medgar Evers: Writing the Long Civil Rights Movement, and coedited The Literature of the American South, a Norton anthology. Minrose began her career as a newspaper reporter. Since then, she has taught as a professor at universities across the country, most recently the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She currently lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Like the characters in Promise, she grew up in Tupelo, Mississippi.
