Kelly Hewitt

East to the Bottom Kelly Hewitt

Fifty years after the lynching of Emmett Till, K. D. Hewitt recalls historical events from the Civil War through today that have influenced and continue to impact the African American male psyche and family. She tells the real life saga of her free black antebellum Georgetown ancestors and Washington, D. C. family as relived through the eyes of their fictitious descendant, Calley MacAllister. Calley is haunted by her ancestors. In the hospital for a routine procedure, she loses consciousness and is spiritually taken to mid nineteenth century Georgetown. Here, the story of Sophia Johnson and her Georgetown/Foggy Bottom descendants' trials and tribulations begin. Their tales depict how certain family members touched U. S. historic events, and how those events touched them. With Calley, the reader traverses from 1857 to the present, through the streets of black Georgetown and Foggy Bottom, while tales of romance, war, suffrage, racketeering, and murder are yarned. K. D. Hewitt paints a canvas upon which actual census, other public records, family-member interviews, and her own life experiences were used to sketch the real, as Calley MacAllister and other characters were conjured to color-in the illusory. As readers cross the threshold into the Johnson's home, they are certain to experience not merely K. D. Hewitt's family, but this country's seeming typical yet unique African American family--the strength of its past not to be forgotten, the power of its future to be forever present.