Allways Wander

Eliminating Kings Allways Wander

Los Angeles is burning and Rye Watson wants to party. Unfortunately, The End of the World bash is a bust, best friend Riley is being weird, and Charlie is blowing up her cell. Bored, she ignores her Lyft's bullet holes and treks cross-city to meet her Family History partner. Inside Canter's Deli, he tells Rye what couldn't wait 'til Monday. Her ancestors owned slaves. One even kept a posthumously published diary. Reading the century-old book's Introduction, she learns its author impregnated the plantation's mistress. Jim Twain's diary illuminates more than life as an enslaved man in St Louis. It also describes the plantation's singularly sadistic overseer --- James Earl Ray. Ray was great-grandfather to Martin Luther King's infamous assassin. Jim is an eyewitness to both owner Donald J. Watson's harvest gala and his guests of honor: Andrew Johnson and John Wilkes Booth. Rye has more questions than answers. It's a familiar mental state. Her father was a wealthy addict who abandoned her; her mother was equally neglectful. Both died when she was young. Raised by a Black grandmother, Rye heard early and often, "Leave the past in the past." Unfortunately, the past is never dead. It's not even past.