For most of the 1800s and part of the 1900s there was a little town just north of St. Louis founded by former slaves, not marked on any map, and impossible for outsiders to find. That’s the premise of Phillip B. Williams’s new novel, Ours, out this year from Viking. The book takes its name from the fictional town where it is set, long since subsumed by the expansion of Lambert Field. The families who founded the town are still living, keeping small parts of its memory alive from one generation to the next.
Ours could best be described as a magical realism novel, since it is full of conjurings, magical snakes, and the disembodied voices of the dead. It could also simply be considered a story that takes the mythos of its characters seriously and describes fantastical occurrences the way they might understand them. In either case, this element of unreality breathes fresh air into what might otherwise be a much more staid work of historical fiction.
At the beginning of the novel, a character named Saint, who possesses powers she doesn’t always fully understand, leads the first inhabitants of the town to kill their former masters and then guides them off the plantations where they had been enslaved. Although regarded as a kind of savior, Saint’s uneven use of power often puts her in adversarial relationships with the town’s other inhabitants, all of whom are fully fleshed out in this sprawling narrative. The story has a tendency to jump both forward and backward in time, taking a discursive rather than linear path to explore the past, present, and future of the central characters.
Before the release of Ours, Williams had been known primarily as a poet. His collection Mutiny won the American Book Award in 2022, and he has received numerous other accolades for his poetry.
Williams’s experience writing in other disciplines serves the book in two ways. First, it explains why the novel has such an unconventional structure, allowing readers to inhabit the atmosphere given in its numerous vignettes. You get the feeling reading it that if you miss a key plot point, there’s no cause for alarm because the gaps end up getting filled as the story circles back to specific moments, adding new layers of detail each time. Second, the language at the sentence level is very much what you’d expect from a poet: rich in imagery and inventive in its use of metaphor. Both of these factors make reading Ours a refreshing experience.
In the end, unraveling what the book posits, a town founded by escaped slaves who have magical protection from the ills of the broader society they inhabit—when slavery would still have been legal in Missouri—may be the most rewarding aspect of reading it, but as ever, readers must decide that for themselves.
Ours, Phillip B. Williams, 592 pages, fiction, Viking, hardcover (6.4 by 9.5 inches), $23.30.
This article was originally published in the July/August 2024 issue of Missouri Life.
