Uncle Moses: A Novel

Abstract

Uncle Moses is an historical novel based on the 1955 kidnapping and murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till that occurred when he was visiting his great-uncle Moses Wright, a Black sharecropper and preacher in the Mississippi Delta. The fictionalized account begins the night Emmett whistles at the young white woman minding the country store where Emmett and his cousins go to buy candy. The novel follows the tragic events that unfold after that encounter, told from the perspective of one of the murderer’s wives. In the novel, she is an autodidact—from a family of limited means with little formal education—inspired to read by the literary Percy family in Greenville, Mississippi where she grew up. She has been friends with 64-year-old Moses Wright since her childhood, when he helped with cotton harvest on the Percy plantation that her father managed.

The book places the fictionalized Moses at the center of the story as the first Black person to ever testify in open court against white defendants in a murder trial.