I am writing this blog post on March 1, 2026, which is both the last day of Black History Month and the first day of Women’s History Month. Given this convergence, I thought today would be an appropriate time to revisit three books that relate to both of these month-long celebrations. These books are Malika J. Stevely’s Song of Redemption, Sonya Y. Ramsey’s Bertha Maxwell-Roddey: A Modern-Day Race Woman and the Power of Black Leadership, and Alicia D. Williams’s Jump at the Sun: The True Life Tale of Unstoppable Storycatcher Zora Neale Hurston. All three books are by Charlotte writers, and all relate to the history of Black women in the American South.
Song of Redemption is a historical novel. Most of the story takes place on a French and English-speaking plantation in Louisiana in the years just before the Civil War, but the opening chapter is set in 1932. In this chapter, a group of construction workers are fixing up an abandoned plantation mansion when they discover the body of a woman behind one of the walls. This event actually happened. When Malika Stevely heard about it, she became curious about the story of the woman whose body was discovered. After doing extensive investigative research, she decided to write a novel based on the life of this woman. In commenting on her approach to writing this novel, Malika said, “I wanted to humanize her as well as solve the mystery behind the oral history. This could only be done by researching and sharing her story as well as the experiences of other enslaved individuals whose names and accounts were silenced or never told. And in conjunction, it was imperative that there was a rich illustration of culture and languages in the book along with the perspectives of women, Blacks, Creoles and Creoles of color.”
Bertha Maxwell-Roddey: A Modern-Day Race Woman and the Power of Black Leadership is a biography of a living legend in Charlotte’s educational circles. Bertha Maxwell-Roddey founded UNC Charlotte’s Black Studies Program (which eventually evolved into the current Africana Studies Department). Before joining UNC Charlotte’s College of Education in 1970, she had an illustrious career as a teacher and principal in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School System. When asked to comment on this biography, Sonya Ramsey said her book is “not just a biography of a phenomenal woman. It represents the untold story of Black women and others who fought to turn the promises and achievements of the civil rights and feminist movements into tangible realities as they fought to make desegregation work in the quiet aftermath of the public civil rights marches and the fiery speeches of Black Power activists in the board rooms and classrooms of the desegregated south from the 1970s to the 1990s.”
Jump at the Sun: The True Life Tale of Unstoppable Storycatcher Zora Neale Hurston is picture book biography of folklorist and writer Zora Neale Hurston. The book is written by Alicia D. Williams and illustrated by Jacqueline Alcántara. In this book, Alicia shows how Hurston’s experiences growing up in Eatonville, Florida, during the 1890s shaped her interest in African American folklore and sparked her love of storytelling. Alicia focuses much of the book on Hurston’s childhood and early adulthood, but she touches on Hurston’s career as a folklorist, anthropologist and professional writer. One of Alicia’s goals in writing this book is to introduce children to the joys that come with sharing folktales. As she told an interviewer, “I want this whole engagement of bringing back the storytelling and oral traditions and sharing them and having fun with them.”
While I have previously written individual blog posts about these books when they first came out, I think that it is good to write about them together in one post, for it seems to me that these books are in conversation with each other. These books tell individual stories, but they all contribute to a larger narrative about the contributions of Black women to the history of America. Since these books are by Charlotte writers, they also contribute to the literary history of Storied Charlotte.