The Auspicious Life of the Whites (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798199072519)

Some families survive history. The Whites rewrote it.

In October 1999, a journalist from The Carolina Standard sat down with Celestine White on a wide front porch in Charlotte, North Carolina, and published what she was given. The article was syndicated in eleven publications. It remains one of the most-read profiles in the paper's history.

What she wasn't given has been kept for two hundred years.

The Auspicious Life of the Whites moves from the Senegambian interior to Southern swamps to cities that do not appear on any map. It is a story about an extraordinary Black family, the wealth they built on their own terms, the resistance they never abandoned, and the kind of freedom that has to be constructed in secret, across generations, before it can ever be named out loud.