Tiffani Staten
with Tiffani Staten
With Love From Harlem:
A Novel of Hazel Scott
by ReShonda Tate
March Book Club Pick
Before we get into this month's pick, let me ask you something. Have you ever met someone whose name should be on the tip of everyone's tongue, but somehow history decided to keep a secret? That's Hazel Scott.
A jazz prodigy. A film star. A civil rights activist who refused to perform at segregated venues at a time when that kind of defiance could cost you everything. Hazel Scott was all of this and more, and ReShonda Tate is making sure we know her name.
With Love from Harlem drops us into 1943 Harlem, when Hazel is just 23 years old and already the kind of woman who commands a room without trying. She's building something real, something hers, and then she meets Adam Clayton Powell Jr., preacher, politician, charismatic as all get out, and very much married. What happens next is the kind of love story that's as complicated as it is consuming, set against the backdrop of one of the most electric eras in Black American history.
Alongside Hazel and Adam, you'll brush shoulders with Billie Holiday, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, the whole Harlem universe rendered vivid and alive. But this isn't just a history lesson dressed up in fiction. It's a story about what a woman has to weigh when love, legacy, and ambition all pull in different directions at once.
This one is our Women's History Month selection, and it fits like it was made for the moment. Because Hazel Scott isn't a footnote. She's a whole book we never got to read. Until now.
Grab your copy, and we'll talk about it at the end of the month.
APRIL'S PICK
Kin
By Tayari Jones
Some books find you at exactly the right moment. And then there are books that feel like they were always meant to exist, like somebody reached into the marrow of Black womanhood and pulled out something so true it almost hurts to look at it directly. Kin is that kind of book.
Tayari Jones took eight years to write this one. Eight years. And when you read it, you'll understand why. You cannot rush something this carefully rendered.
The story begins in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, where two little girls grow up practically breathing the same air. Vernice and Annie are bound by something deeper than proximity. They are bound by absence. Both of them were raised without their mothers, each in her own particular kind of silence, and that shared wound becomes the root of a friendship that will stretch across decades, across cities, across the kind of distances that would break most relationships entirely.
Their paths couldn't look more different. Vernice lands at Spelman College in Atlanta, stepping into a world of Black women who carry themselves like they know exactly what they are worth. Annie goes searching, following the ghost of a mother who left and never looked back, and that search takes her somewhere far more unpredictable and far more dangerous.
But here is what Jones understands that not every writer does: divergence is not disconnection. The story of Vernice and Annie is really a story about what survives when life pulls women in opposite directions. It is about friendship as an act of will, motherlessness as a shape that forms you whether you acknowledge it or not, and what it truly means to make a life in the American South when so much has been stacked against you from the beginning.
Set against the backdrop of Jim Crow, this is not a story that lets history be wallpaper. It is in the fabric of every decision these women make. And yet Jones never lets the era swallow the people. Vernice and Annie are too fully alive for that.
We are reading this one in April, and we have a lot to talk about.
Available wherever books are sold
THE INK IS BLACK BLOG
