The Dupree women’s experiences span 20th-century African American history. In 1917, Jubi’s unmasking as a Black woman passing as white illustrates what historian Allyson Hobbs terms the “chosen exile” of racial passing, a precarious strategy shaped by the violent enforcement of Jim Crow’s color line (Hobbs, Allyson. A Chosen Exile. Harvard UP, 2014). Hobbs’ research underscored the loss of family identity and history that such people were born into because they were willingly distancing themselves from the traditions that helped them to make sense of who they were. This informs the dilemma at the heart of Jubi’s storyline, where she strives to justify her decision to pass as a white woman, even to the point of abducting the light-skinned baby Gladys to reintegrate herself into the white segment of her community. It also represents the wider fear of the inequalities that marked the difference between living as a white American and as a Black American at the start of the century.

The Great Depression compounded racial inequities in the 1930s. Sampson returns to Land’s End from Mobile unable to find work despite his education, reflecting disproportionate Black unemployment that Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates placed near 50% in some cities (Van, Germinal G. “The Economic Condition of African Americans During The Great Depression (1929-1941).” Germinal G. Van, 2020). Nevertheless, there were certain jobs that gave Black Americans opportunities to earn at the time, including that of the Pullman porter, a porter who worked specifically on Pullman sleeper trains after the American Civil War. Up until the 1960s, majority of the porters hired by the Pullman Company were Black, leveraging the service skills of formerly enslaved people looking for work. Historically, Pullman porters were widely seen as a driving force in the development of a Black middle class and helped to drive reforms in Black labor through movements like the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the country’s first all-Black labor union. In the novel, Williams represents this profession through the character of Eugene, whose steady job enables him to support his wife, Gladys, and their daughter, Nadia.

By the 1950s, Gladys’s sexual assault by two white men who face no consequence exemplifies the unprosecuted violence against Black women that historian Danielle McGuire documented through the story of rape survivor Recy Taylor and the efforts of civil rights activist Rosa Parks to expose the systemic precarity of Black women in At the Dark End of the Street (McGuire, Danielle. At the Dark End of the Street. Knopf, 2010.) Though Taylor managed to bring the case to court, the jury ultimately dismissed her case, after which Taylor was met with threats and even destruction of her home property. Fear of racist social consequences inform Gladys’s marriage to Eugene and their choice to flee northward. This in turn mirrors the Second Great Migration, when roughly 5 million African Americans left the South between 1940 and 1970.

In 1980s and 1990s Chicago, Nadia and Tati inherit the economic aftermath of these upheavals. Nadia drops out of college under caregiving demands and finds mobility blocked at minimum wage, while Tati grows up fatherless in a city reshaped by the erosion of Black employment, a crisis sociologist William Julius Wilson analyzed in The Truly Disadvantaged (Wilson, William Julius. The Truly Disadvantaged. U of Chicago P, 1987). Wilson’s study argued for the impact that deindustrialization in inner cities had on employment conditions, indicating that these issues of economic organization were more to blame for poverty than the demographic or social behaviors of inner city communities. Gladys, who speaks as the eldest member within the contemporary frame of the novel, acknowledges that despite decades of change, conditions have shifted “not that damn much” (68), capturing the novel’s argument that while the mechanisms of racial oppression evolved across the century, the consequences of those conditions on the lives of Black Americans endured.