Written in the Waters: A Memoir of History, Home, and Belonging

Journalist Roberts considers the costs of the global slave trade and its impact on her own family in her engrossing debut. During a 2017 visit to Washington, D.C.’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, Roberts saw a photo of Black scuba divers exploring sunken slave ships. A placard identified the divers as members of the underwater archaeology collective Diving with a Purpose. Moved to join the group in searching “faraway lands right here on Earth” to “tell unknown and untold stories about one of the darkest moments of human history,” Roberts accompanied the divers to shipwrecks off the coasts of South Africa and Costa Rica and slave auction sites in Benin and Togo. As she documents her travels, Roberts sharply reflects on how the transatlantic slave trade led to a “justification for systemic racism,” and catalogs its reverberations within her family tree; in one memorable section, she visits North Carolina and learns that her formerly enslaved great-grandfather took possession of 174 acres of land there after the Civil War. Roberts matches a reporter’s meticulousness with a memoirist’s emotional attunement, delivering a sweeping survey of slavery’s repercussions. It’s a must-read. Agent: Tayla MacKinnon, MacKinnon Literary. (Jan)