Fugitive Archives

An incisive, lyrical exploration of her family’s history radically overturns American myths about race, violence, and belonging.

Asale Angel-Ajani and her twin, the only Black children in a working-class white family, were shuffled between relatives, coming of age in a country that offered little refuge. Years later, Angel-Ajani dove into the archives, searching for an explanation for her family’s and her country’s contradictions, and for her own unshakeable anger. 

What she found were records and stories of her ancestors enslaved and free, Indigenous and white, members of the KKK and Black fugitives of a justice system that was rarely just. How could so much love live alongside such hate and prejudice, within the same family? Forged by the violent systems that rewarded racial terror and segregation, Angel-Ajani’s ancestors built their lives together anyway, on the shaky foundation of love and cognitive dissonance. 

Fugitive Archives reveals that we are not a country of strangers split into “us” and “them,” who merely need to get to know each other in order to empathize. We have always been deeply entangled. This story of one family’s grief, betrayal, and courage is a vital exploration of race and class, a map for survival and resistance, and a necessary reckoning—for only when we acknowledge the complex, messy truth of who we are as a country, can we shape a more just future.

• "Fugitive Archives is a furious and compassionate refusal to settle for easy answers. Through the violent contradictions embedded within her own lineage, Angel-Ajani writes with stunning precision about how our bodies carry the webs of history that shape our most intimate bonds."
  Tessa Hulls, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Feeding Ghost
• “In Fugitive Archives, Angel-Ajani masterfully blends jaw-dropping personal narrative, uncommonly rigorous scholarship, and lyrical prose to illuminate the construction and destruction of race, particularly in relation to class. Moving, enlightening, at times disturbing, at all times unflinching, and extremely timely in its arrival—this is easily among the best books I’ve read in years.” 
  Jerald Walker, author of How to Make a Slave and Other Essays
• “Filled with wonders and mysteries, with plot twists and startling revelations, Fugitive Archives is unlike any other book you’ve read about race. Asale Angel-Ajani writes with boundless intelligence and empathy as she enters the haunted spaces of her family’s near and distant past. In the process, she uncovers the great secrets at the heart of that fraught, collective story called the United States of America.”
  Héctor Tobar, author of Our Migrant Souls and Deep Down Dark