I AM MEMORIED – a new unpublished novel by Valerie Mason-John
Agent – Ken Shermann Associates
Ken Sherman & Associates
9507 Santa Monica Blvd., Ste. 300
Beverly Hills, CA. 90210
310-273-8840
310-271-2875 (Fax)
ken@kenshermanassociates.com
Please contact Ken Sherman at the above address for interest in publishing my new novel.
Logline: By sleeping with a white woman in London, an African man breaks a family oath and unleashes a curse against his family and his village. It can only be broken by the return of the bastard daughter he left behind – a girl who doesn’t even know she’s part black.
Synopsis: Yaata, spirit of Africa, looks onwards at her guardians as they are ushered into the bowels of ships by white men in tall rubber boots. They do not know, but as they fetter her children in chains, rip her roots from the ground to be potted elsewhere and mount her sacred diamonds in jewelry they are stealing away Yaata’s protection over the land.
When TAMBA FENGAI was born, it was a huge shock. Unlike his older twin, SAHR, who is dark as molasses, Tamba came out fair as golden sand. Clearly the juice blood SIA, born into slavery in the land of Caribs, brought back to Africa with her still flows through their maternal line. Obsessed with everything English, he disdains the national obsession with diamonds and travels to London to become a dentist. Unlike Sahr who remains behind mining diamonds, Tamba leaves Africa and his sons WINSTON, CHURCHILL, and HAROLD to get his dental degree.
It has taken 17 months but Tamba is finally going out with his friends to a party. They assure him this party will be different. Before he leaves for the party he drinks palm wine and eats kola nuts, drifting back into the comfort of Africa. There are only white woman at the party, but Tamba doesn’t mind. Splash! A bronzed woman catches his eye as her wide hips swim in between his legs and she pulls him into the pool. It was just lust.
You scored! The words ring hollow in his head as his friends congratulate him on the ride home. He knows that it’s useless to explain to others why he must return to Africa, flee this shame. Four months later the phone rings. It’s ELIZABETH CLIFFORD-BARNSLEY. She’s pregnant. Turning his back on Yaata, he sells a diamond his brother gave him as a protective amulet to buy fake dentist papers. No one back home in Sierra Leone will know the difference. But blood is now in Tamba’s hands.
Elizabeth is devastated. She simply can not raise a negroid child. What would her parents think? She would certainly lose her inheritance and CEDRIC, oh though he was the reason she went to those awful sex parties in the first place, he would blame her for the child. He loves her passionately, pays for her art to be showed in galleries throughout the city, and admires her for taking so well to his sexual fantasies. The masks, the bondage, the couples- Elizabeth was always just playing along. This was the first time she went to one of those hotel parties without Ceddy.
She can’t hide the secret any longer. Even her friend LIBBY who she gossipped to about sleeping with that black stallion notices. Cedric notices too. He’s turned on by her new plumpness. When she tells him, he’s ecstatic that he will finally have a son. Elizabeth protests that they can’t even take care of their daughter ASTRA who they constantly ship off to relatives or boarding school. She tells him it’s not his, that it’s from one of their parties.
The couple travels to Shropshire to visit an old friend, DR FITZGERALD. He refuses to perform a late-term abortion. The doctor has an idea: he and his wife have tried hard to have a child without success, if he can only convince his wife to adopt the baby as her own… He talks it over to her later that night, omitting the tiny detail of the baby’s race. It’s agreed that Elizabeth and Cedric will never see the child again. HARRIET is to be the Fitzgerald’s.
Pig snout and Cotton Wool head. That’s what the other children call Harriet at school. She longs to replace the twisted, curly red mess atop her head with Barbie hair. Her African features stand out in the little town, but her pale porcelain skin allows her mother to laugh it off as the mark of a distant relative from Spain.
Harriet is back from college. She hits her joint as she talks to FINGERS, her Landolphia plant, who like her is an African transplant. She tells the plant how she met GIDEON, son of a Jewish American woman with no known dad. She finds a diamond in Fingers’ pot and wears it around her neck as a good luck charm.
That summer Gideon gives Harriet a flier for a different kind of hair salon to tackle her mess. She’s offended that he suggests she’s black, but wonders into an unknown part of London to have her hair sorted anyway. Dressed in cheap sunglasses and a scarf to hide her appearance, she appears lots and confused. She leaves the salon with a stunning blonde weave. The experience confirms that she does have African hair and causes her to ask her mom unsettling questions about her childhood. She accuses her mother of sleeping with a black man and storms back to college.
At Christmas the Fitzgeralds reveal that Harriet is indeed adopted, but that they do not know who the father is. Her mother takes to drinking more heavily and popping more calming pills to ease her distress over the questioning. When she leaves for school, they are still uncertain and anxious, hoping that she won’t abandon them as their daughter now knowing what she knows. Her father hands her an envelope.
Together, Harriet and Gideon search the internet for the name in the envelope: Elizabeth Clifford Barnsley. They decide to stake out where Elizabeth and Cedric live, with Gideon carrying a camera to tape their arrival. When Cedric demands the video tape Gideon is dumbfounded. Cedric’s beard looks just like Gideon’s when he grows his out. It’s like he’s seen a ghost.
Gideon puts two and two together after questioning his mother and discovers that Cedric is his biological father. Likewise, Harriet is certain that Elizabeth is her mother, making the two half-siblings by marriage. They confront the couple together at one of Elizabeth’s gallery shows. All four leave stunned and confused by the encounter, and Astra gives Gideon her business card as they both recognize their uncanny physical resemblance.
Back in Sierra Leone, civil war erupts. Sahr joins rebel forces after they slaughter and pillage the village, ripping Tamba’s unborn daughter from his wife’s womb. Tamba runs off into the jungle and wanders hopelessly, encountering more chaos and destruction as he travels. Eventually he loses his right arm and winds up at a refugee camp. His oldest sons are in America, studying to become successful young men.
A business card and an angry letter asking the Fitzgeralds to never contact her again arrive from Elizabeth. There is no note attached, but the business card is clearly that of Harriet’s biological father. Harriet ends things with Gideon and leaves for Africa, determined to return to Tamba Fengai. She arrives at his death bed, easing his soul as he passes on with all his surviving children around him.
Harriet pushes out twins. They both are lovely shades of dark brown, but neither resemble her nor DANIEL, her African husband she met on the plane home to England.
WHAT THE READERS ARE SAYING
‘original and fascinating elements — the underlying back story, theliterary style and narrative dimensions’ Alan Rinzler
(developmental Editor on Novel)
‘Polished- literary archeologists, – extraordinary, truly epic. I am gripped by Tamba’s story as at times, with the other sections, (Clifford – Barnsleys and the
Fitzgeralds)’ Professor Maria Lima (reader) Specialist in African Diaspora Literature
‘The Yaata is a profoundly unsettling yet vindicating thread that throbs through all the destinies you have created. It is a spell, a web, a fabric of lives
that you have spun, woven, written’ Dr Diedre Forbes (Reader) Specialist in African diaspora Literature
‘It’s a passionate and at times quite disturbing piece of writing, and it brings up many interesting and important issues – wonderful interweaving narratives’
reader
‘It reminds me of the groundbreaking work the Nigerian writer Amos Tutola and is on its own very poetic’ reader
‘A tale of heartbreak and deceit, love and renewal, this work would sell well with women of most ages.’






