ALBERTVILLE

SYNOPSIS

Patrice Lumumba was wrong. Jesse Westcott knew what it was like to be violated. She knew what it was like to lose a loved one, to be insulted, degraded. To be betrayed. Albertville was as much her nemesis as it was Lumumba’s. But only one would survive it.

Just thirteen years old when her brother Bill, a Boston-educated lawyer, returns to Birmingham, Jesse is a product of the segregated Alabama of the 1940s and 50s. Her brother, an activist with the NAACP, intends to go into nearby Albertville for voter registration. Jesse worships her brother but knows him to be impetuous, a courter of trouble, someone who won’t be pushed around. Against her better judgment, she joins him on his fateful ride. But on the road to Albertville, he parks the car and disappears into the neighboring woods. Jesse never sees him again. Worse. The men who do away with her brother do not leave her alone.

Jesse carries the scars of Albertville north to Boston. She keeps them buried deep inside even as she graduates college, prepares to join the Olympic fencing squad, earns her Masters in French Literature. Her future is mapped out for her. She wants to live the literary life, become a novelist and settle on the banks of the Seine. She is conservative, voted for Eisenhower, and takes a dim view of civil rights leaders who advocate defiance. But everything changes when Allan Crosswhite, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and her former lover, recruits her to join the US State Department.

Crosswhite has plans for his ex. He is not just a journalist but has secret connections to the CIA. It is now 1960. The Cold War is at its height. Korea is over. Viet Nam lies ahead. Nixon is fighting Kennedy for the presidency, and the war between the East and the West is about to get even hotter.

Using Crosswhite’s connections, Jesse is assigned to the American embassy in the Congo at the moment that African nation gains its independence from Belgium. Mutiny awaits. Secession. Civil War. It is a dangerous stage to stand on. Only the most charismatic of men can hold the country together. Only the most dangerous will let it fly apart in the face of unwanted Western intervention. Patrice Lumumba is elected by his people to be that man. And Jesse has been chosen to be his American watchdog.

ALBERTVILLE is the coming of age story of a young black woman, raised in the embattled American South, sent into the heart of darkest Africa to bond with a man who resembles her brother, but whom she must try to save at all costs while her handlers at State and the CIA seek his removal. The novel ends as it begins, this time on the road to Albertville, the Congo. It is a road Jesse has traveled once before. It is a road she will never leave behind.