Everyman

Everyman, a multigenerational saga that begins in 1972 Chicago and weaves narratives backwards to 1920s Georgia and the Great Migration of African-Americans fleeing southern persecution for Northern opportunities.

AUTHOR
PUBLISHING FORMAT
NUMBER OF PAGES
YEAR OF ISSUE
ISBN

M Shelly Conner

Paperback, Hardcover, Audiobook

350

2021

979-8200834341

Synopsis

Eve Mann arrives in Ideal, Georgia, in 1972 looking for answers about the mother who died giving her life. A mother named Mercy. A mother who for all of Eve’s twenty-two years has been a mystery and a quest. Eve’s search for her mother, and the father she never knew, is a mission to discover her identity, her name, her people, and her home.

Eve’s questions and longing launch a multigenerational story that sprawls back to the turn of the twentieth century, settles into the soil of the South, the blood and souls of Black folk making love and life and fleeing in a Great Migration into the savage embrace of the North.

Eve is a young woman coming of age in Chicago against the backdrop of the twin fires and fury of the civil rights and Black Power movements—a time when everything and everyone, it seems, longs to be made anew.

At the core of this story are the various meanings of love—how we love and, most of all, whom we love. everyman is peopled by rebellious Black women straining against the yoke of convention and designated identities, explorers announcing their determination to be and to be free. There is Nelle, Eve’s best friend and heart, who claims her right both to love women and to always love Eve as a sister and friend.

Brother Lee Roy, professor and mentor, gives Eve the tools for her genealogical search while turning away from his own bitter harvest of family secrets. Mama Ann, the aunt who has raised Eve and knows everything about Mercy, offers Eve a silence that she defines as protection and care. But it is James and Geneva, two strangers whom Eve meets in Ideal, who plumb the depths of their own hurt and reconciliations to finally give Eve the gift of her past, a reimagined present, and finally, her name.

Other Works

Around The Web

The Real Green Book

Mise en Abyme: Black Queer Woman Watching Black Queer Woman Writing Black Queer Woman

Discovering My Femininity in Menswear

Homophobia Under the Big Top

Dapper: Fashioning a Queer Aesthetic of Black Womanhood

Chris Rock's Biggest Oscar Failure

"Bitches Don't Know What They Want": On Unsolicited Dick Offers and Misogynoir

Don't Get Caught Sleeping: Male Desire of Unconscious Women

Film and Stage

Quare Life (2018)

Webisode screened at OutFest, NewFest: NY’s LGBTQ Film Festival, Twist (Seattle), Out on Film (Atlanta)

NoMmO Remote Control (2003)

Co-written comedy sketch show produced at Second City (Chicago).

Broken Fences (2014)

Stage play (formerly titled Everybody Has Their Own Lives), Black Playwrights Festival, Black Ensemble Theater (Chicago).

 

Print

“Passing.” Skin to Skin Magazine, Issue 4, Dec 2013.

SHORT STORY

“The Uses of Salt.” Obsidian: Literature in the African Diaspora, 2016.

Novel Excerpt

 

“Carolina Anole.” Black from the Future: A Collection of Black Speculative Writing, BLF Press, 2019.

Short Story