The Unforgettable Tale of a Family’s Determination to Live “Undefined” by Race

Provenance is a sweeping family saga set in the early 20th century—after the Civil War and before the civil rights era—a time when the destiny of a black family had to be self-determined. It is an unforgettable tale of the choices and chances that determined men and women took to live the life they imagined for themselves. Provenance paints a vivid picture of the courage, love, loss, beauty, passion, history and healing that strengthened and preserved American families.

Click this link to read an Excerpt from Provenance

In the tradition of Passing, Nella Larsen’s seminal classic on race and The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt’s art-infused coming-of-age epic, Donna Drew Sawyer’s, Provenance, is a tale of triumph despite tragedy. It is the exciting story of a family’s quest to ensure their own destiny during the early 20th century—a fascinating period in African American history that is rarely explored in literary fiction. For African American men and women, it was a time when risking everything to take more than society was willing to offer was a daring and often solitary act.

Hank Whitaker longed for more than a black man in Virginia could have in the early 20^th century. When a fateful incident forces him to use his racially ambiguous looks to escape certain death, Hank assumes the identity of the same people who revile him. He never imagined he would fall in love and marry a white woman, but spirited Maggie Bennett changes everything. Now, Hank can never return to being the man he used to be. If the secret of his heritage is revealed he loses everything—his family, his successful business and his life.

But tragedy strikes again, and Hank is forced to confesses to his wife and 18-year-old son, Lance, that he is really a black man passing as white. The revelation that he is not the privileged scion of the segregated south launches Lance, along with his mother Maggie and his grandmother, Charlotte, on an epic journey. Charlotte is running from a past her family knows nothing about. Maggie is reeling from her husband’s secret. She is also desperate to escape prosecution— interracial marriage is illegal under Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act making Maggie a criminal and her beloved son a bastard, and a Negro, in the heart of the segregated south.

Like many African Americans, more than 200,000 before World War I, the family flees the U.S. hoping to find freedom in the liberté, égalité, fraternité of France. Among the wealthy expats in Europe, Lance finds passion and purpose in the frenzied art scene in the City of Light. With World War II on the horizon, the family is forced to return to America where their legacy of lies may make happiness an elusive aspiration.