He sets out on a whirlwind tour of the state to dig up all the secret caches of money he'd planted decades earlier, when the Justice Committee the organization he founded with similarly gifted family members and friends to protect black activists in the '60s was dissolving. Johnny Ribkins a 72-year-old with an uncanny talent for making maps of any place, whether he's ever seen it or not has five days to pay a debt to a Florida crime boss. Du Bois’s famous essay “The Talented Tenth” and fueled by Ladee Hubbard’s marvelously original imagination, T he Talented Ribkins is a big-hearted debut novel about race, class, politics, and the unique gifts that, while they may cause some problems from time to time, bind a family together.īlending the superhuman with the civil rights movement, this debut novel is an ambitious, if uneven, attempt to explore new dimensions of the struggle for racial justice. His brother is gone, but he has an unexpected sidekick: his brother’s daughter, Eloise, who has a special superpower of her own. Out of frustration Johnny and his brother used their talents to stage a series of burglaries, each more daring than the last.įast forward a couple decades and Johnny’s on a race against the clock to dig up loot he’s stashed all over Florida. But when their, eh, superpowers proved insufficient, the group fell apart. In the old days, the Ribkins family tried to apply their gifts to the civil rights effort, calling themselves The Justice Committee.
And Johnny himself can make precise maps of any space you name, whether he’s been there or not. His brother could scale perfectly flat walls. For example, Johnny’s father could see colors no one else could see. What may or may not be useful to Johnny as he flees is that he comes from an African-American family that has been gifted with superpowers that are a bit, well, odd. Du Bois essay (Toni Morrison)Īt seventy-two, Johnny Ribkins shouldn’t have such problems: He’s got one week to come up with the money he stole from his mobster boss or it’s curtains. Winner of the William Faulkner, William Wisdom PrizeĪ family with superpowers stumble in their efforts to succeed in life in this “original and wildly inventive” novel about race, class, and politics-based on a W.E.B. Winner of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award
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