Sister X and the Victims of Foul Play

An innovative, immersive, and long-lost triumph of Black feminist experimentation tracking the fallout of a dancer’s death through a winding conversation between her oldest friends.

In the early 1970s, two Americans meet in Paris. Black Will is a “Travelin’ Man”—a romantic Black Power devotee who has dedicated himself, since his release from prison, to seeing as much of the world as he can. Abyssinia, on the other hand, has already spent years in France, working as a seamstress and finding that life as a Black woman is no less taxing in the city of lights.

At the center of their vibrant dialogue is their old friend, Sister X Arista Prolo—glamorous, magnetic, and recently killed in a strange incident at the burlesque where she worked as a dancer. As Will and Abyssinia exchange stories about Sister X and their shared Detroit youths, their conversation shifts between mourning and laughter, wonder and rage.

A truly inventive and unjustly neglected voice of the Black Arts Movement, Carlene Hatcher Polite combines intimate dialogue with soaring musicality, polyphonic prose, and exuberant formal experimentation. A searing indictment of racism, sexism, and greed, Sister X and the Victims of Foul Play is at once a bold political novel and a singular engagement with text, sound, and language itself.