Book Description

Calvin Baker first entered the literary landscape at the age of twenty-three with the publication of Naming the New World, which Publishers Weekly called brilliant ... Baker] proves himself a powerful new male voice in African American literature. Since his second novel, Once Two Heroes, Baker has continued to be acclaimed by the major media from USA Today to The Village Voice and GQ. And now, with Dominion, Baker has written his most ambitious, important, and timely book yet. Dominion tells the story of Jasper Merian, newly freed from slavery in Virginia at the close of the seventeenth century, who leaves for the uncharted free territory to the west. There, he aims to carve out a utopia in the wilderness of the Carolinas. While grappling with the legacy he has left behind, Jasper must build a home for himself to pass down to his two sons--one enslaved, the other free. Despite the hardships of frontier life and the malignant local spirit Ould Lowe, Jasper and his wife, Sanne, manage to build the thriving estate, Stonehouses. The farm passes through three generations, ministered in turn by Jasper's son Magnus and his grandson Caleum. Their lives bring them up against the natural (and occasionally supernatural) world, colonial politics, the injustices of slavery, the Revolutionary War, and questions of fidelity and the heart. When Caleum, discharged from the colonial army, lingers in New Amsterdam with another woman instead of returning to his family, the threads binding Stonehouses together begin to unravel. Ould Lowe, long restrained, again haunts the land, and, like his grandfather, Caleum must ultimately face the demon. Footed in both myth and modernity, Calvin Baker crafts a rich, intricate, and moving novel, with meditations on God, responsibility, and familial legacies. While masterfully incorporating elements of the world's oldest and greatest stories, the end result is a bold contemplation of the origins of America.