A 10-year anniversary reissue of award-winning actress Denise Nicholas’s critically acclaimed debut novel. This coming-of-age story set in Mississippi during the Freedom Summer of 1964 is often regarded as one of the most important novels about the civil rights movement.
Freshwater Road tells the story of one young woman’s coming-of-age via the political and social upheavals of the civil rights movement. When University of Michigan sophomore Celeste Tyree travels to Mississippi to volunteer her efforts in Freedom Summer, she’s assigned to help register voters in the small town of Pineyville, a place best known for a notorious lynching that occurred only a few years earlier.
As Celeste helps lift the veil of oppression by preparing her adult students for their showdown with the county registrar, she learns valuable lessons about race, social change, and violence. All the while, she struggles with loneliness, a worried father in Detroit, and her burgeoning feelings for Ed Jolivette, a young man also spending the summer in Mississippi. As the summer unfolds, Celeste confronts not only the political realities of race and poverty in this tiny town but also deep truths about her family and herself.
Before her long career as a TV and film star (Room 222, In the Heat of the Night), Denise Nicholas worked with the Free Southern Theater and toured small towns throughout the South in during Freedom Summer. Nicholas was inspired by her travels to write Freshwater Road, which Newsday has lauded as “the best work of fiction ever done about the civil rights movement.”
Civil rights issues have only become more resonant and important since the book was originally published in 2005, making this story all too familiar and relevant to readers. In Freshwater Road, Denise Nicholas has created an unforgettable story that—more than 10 years after first appearing in print—continues to be one of the most cherished works of civil rights fiction.
Denise Nicholas is an award-winning actress who has starred in numerous television programs and films. She has been a civil rights and social activist since the beginning of her career. She was a member of New York City’s Negro Ensemble Company, and during the 1960s, she performed throughout the Deep South with the Free Southern Theater, which served as inspiration for Freshwater Road. She lives in Southern California and is currently at work on a memoir.