The Chaneysville Incident

John Washington is a Black historian teaching in Philadelphia when word reaches him that Old Jack, the man who raised him after his own father's death, is dying back in the mountains of rural Pennsylvania. He returns to the town he fled and finds himself pulled into the mystery of his father Moses Washington, a moonshiner and self-taught scholar who died under strange circumstances, and behind that mystery an older one: the legend of thirteen runaway enslaved people, led by John's great-grandfather C.K., who chose death over recapture near a place called Chaneysville. Trained to trust documents, John has to reckon with a family truth that only folklore and imagination can finish, and the telling of it becomes his own reckoning with history, race, and the woman he loves.