Gail Milissa Grant’s novel The Sable Cloak begins with the end of a life and ends with life beginning anew. The book contains interconnected stories between 1911-1964, starting with a man who, after having killed a young child while driving intoxicated, is sentenced to a gruesome death by the Black town’s vigilante group. Big Will Anderson has turned 18 and, much to his dismay, has graduated into this policing entity. As his induction, Big Will carries out the criminal’s fatal sentence. His anxiety eats at him throughout the ordeal. After he returns, his grief and regret manifest into a ghost that constantly haunts him.
Big Will leaves and stays with his cousin but before beginning his self-imposed exile, his father hands him a mason jar half full of salt water and seven dimes to keep as a remedy to ward off the ghoul. As the only supernatural element in the book, it serves as the theme for the stories that come after it. Black people are unwanted and mistreated and live with the “ghost” of slavery and Jim Crow looming.
The characters in this book consistently carve their own way to success. As a boy, Jordan Sable trains horses on a small farm owned by a white man who treats Jordan’s father poorly. After his father dies, Jordan departs abruptly and intimidates his way into a position as a garbage collector, railway cleaner, and blacksmith’s assistant. His charisma and determination allow him to quickly turn each job into a position of pride. His clients and employers were happy with his stellar results. So much so that one day, the blacksmith pulls him into a more lucrative endeavor—voter influence.
Jordan parlays his relationship with his boss into relationships with the citizens, movers, and shakers of town. He soon takes over his boss’s role, making a good living and acquiring a significant amount of power bartering with politicians to create and sustain certain benefits for Black people in return for their votes. He becomes too powerful and there is an assassination attempt on his life. He’s shot in the throat, silencing one of the few Black voices in the public sphere.
When Jordan goes down, his wife Sarah steps up. Her story begins as a little girl who always wanted to own her own business. Her mother owned her own general store and Sarah shares her entrepreneurial spirit. She adapts rather quickly into her place as the spouse of a political influencer. She earns her own cachet among the powerful people in town, so when Jordan falls, she assumes the interim position. Grant’s female characters are capable of anything and everything necessary to sustain a place within the family, workplace, and society. Even through significant trauma, women push through, survive, and come out the other side.
The Sable Cloak meanders at times—the story trajectory isn’t always clear—though it’s possible this is intentional. The characters are “everyday people,” not the figureheads repeatedly traipsed across various screens during Black History Month currently. Not everyone could be a nationally recognized leader. Some people were business owners who made a way when there was none. Grant makes clear the importance of acknowledging the people doing work at the “ground level” just as often as the people getting all the shine.
Grant’s novel, published posthumously, is a tribute to “overlooked Black Americans who succeeded in the face of prodigious odds, served as examples for their progeny, and set in motion a social movement without end.” She explains how working through her memoir, At the Elbows of My Elders: One Family’s Journey Toward Civil Rights, people from her hometown became the characters in this book. It was important to highlight the presence of Black men who ran a business and navigated the political landscape cunningly and Black women who are able to do the same and thrive in the role. There are important citizens in the Black community who Grant showcases because their contribution to American history is an example of heroism that should live on forever.
FICTION
The Sable Cloak
By Gail Milissa Grant
Grand Central Publishing
Published February 4, 2025
