Fugitive Archives

For readers of Cathy Park Hong, Imani Perry, and Jesmyn Ward, Angel-Ajani’s raw, lyrical exploration of her family history radically overturns American myths about race, violence, and belonging. Raised by a working-class white mother with few choices and fewer protections, Asale Angel-Ajani and her twin—her only Black children—were quietly abandoned in their teenage years, left to navigate a country full of prejudice on their own. When her grandmother, the family’s record keeper, died, Angel-Ajani took up the archive, looking for answers—about her mother’s abandonment, her father’s struggles, her grandmother’s overt racism and later love story with her Black step-grandfather, and the many contradictions she witnessed growing up. Most urgently, she sought to understand her own inescapable anger. Angel-Ajani uncovered a story she never expected to find. Branch by branch, she traced her family tree back to enslaved, Native, free, and white ancestors, revealing a history that America still refuses to confront: one about a nation not of strangers divided, but of lives intimately entangled across race and ethnicity. She threads this ordinary family’s lives through the larger national narrative, showing the connections deliberately erased from official accounts, how these shared bonds have been broken to create a false “us” and “them,” and why reckoning with this divide is urgent and unavoidable. In an age marked by fractured realities, moral exhaustion, and rising exclusion, Fugitive Archives is a vital exploration of race and class—and a call to confront the truths of our past to shape a more just future.