One of the epigraphs with which Jabari Asim opens his new novel, YONDER, is a line from a Black folk song: “Got one mind for the boss to see, Got another mind for what I know is me.” Then comes an opening paragraph that both echoes this lyric and sets the book’s overriding theme: “All of us have two tongues. The first is for them… The second is for us… This tongue is rich, savory, and, if we’re not mindful, can bring us to ruin. This tongue reminds us that, despite everything, we love.”

The ”them” here are the white enslavers, called “Thieves” in the novel, to whom so much of the lived experience --- particularly the emotional reality --- of their enslaved people (called “Stolen” in the book) was entirely invisible. Part of this, as Asim vividly illustrates, was by design, but it was partly due to the fact that the Thieves had so thoroughly Othered the Stolen that it was incomprehensible to imagine that they could feel pain, sorrow, joy or love.

"Asim’s account of these people’s lives shows that they possess not only grief and pain, but also deep reserves of strength, the capability for revenge, and a powerful hope for the future."

In YONDER, set on a Southern plantation in 1852, characters experience all of these things, in a narrative that is both redemptive and heartbreaking. Asim sets the tone right away, when one of his main characters, William, witnesses a horrific scene involving Stolen children. This experience is so indelibly haunting that, when William grows up and falls in love with a woman named Margaret, he refuses to get her pregnant lest their child suffer a similarly unspeakable fate. Meanwhile, Margaret understands that her greatest value to the plantation owner (Randolph “Cannonball” Greene) is her ability to bear children for him to steal in turn. She has become aware that if she fails to conceive, Cannonball Greene will offer her to another of the Stolen men, one she doesn’t even love.

Margaret and William are two of the voices we hear from in YONDER, along with Cato --- who is tentatively allowing himself to love again after having his heart broken years before --- and Pandora, the young woman he loves. There’s also Ransom, a free Black man and itinerant preacher who tries to entice the Stolen with visions (as the title suggests) of a world beyond the one they’ve always known, but the other characters have difficulty trusting him. The novel is also populated by several memorable secondary characters, including the ruthlessly cruel Black foreman Cupid, Silent Mary the cook, and, most heartbreakingly, Little Zander, a young man with fanciful ideas who imagines himself akin to the mythical Stolen people who can fly.

To Asim’s Stolen people, language is important. Each new baby is given seven Words when they are born --- words that they repeat daily like a mantra to remind themselves who they are and what they possess. Again, to Thieves like Cannonball Greene, the Stolen appear to possess nothing. However, Asim’s account of these people’s lives shows that they possess not only grief and pain, but also deep reserves of strength, the capability for revenge, and a powerful hope for the future. But at the heart of the novel, appropriately enough, is love --- love that is beyond the comprehension of the Thieves but means everything to the Stolen.