An incisive, lyrical exploration of one family’s history that radically overturns American myths about race, violence, and belonging.

"Fugitive Archives is a deeply moving and powerful account of America’s tortured landscape of race and class, all too often hidden behind the facade of a devotion to liberty and equality. A must-read as the country reaches 250 years of its existence."—Annette Gordon-Reed, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of On Juneteenth and The Hemingses of Monticello 

Asale Angel-Ajani and her twin, the only Black children in a working-class white family, were shuffled between relatives, coming of age in a country that offered little refuge. Years later, Angel-Ajani dove into the archives, searching for an explanation for her family’s and her country’s contradictions, and for her own unshakeable anger.

What she found were records and stories of her ancestors enslaved and free, Indigenous and white, members of the KKK and Black fugitives of a justice system that was rarely just. How could so much love live alongside such hate and prejudice, within the same family? Forged by the violent systems that rewarded racial terror and segregation, Angel-Ajani’s ancestors built their lives together anyway, on the shaky foundation of love and cognitive dissonance.

Fugitive Archives reveals that we are not a country of strangers split into “us” and “them,” who merely need to get to know each other in order to empathize. We have always been deeply entangled. This story of one family’s grief, betrayal, and courage is a vital exploration of race and class, a map for survival and resistance, and a necessary reckoning—for only when we acknowledge the complex, messy truth of who we are as a country, can we shape a more just future.

Asale Angel-Ajani is the author of Strange Trade: The Story of Two Women Who Risked Everything in the International Drug Trade and the novel A Country You Can Leave. She’s held residencies at Djerassi, Millay, Playa, Tin House, and VONA, and is a recipient of grants from the Ford, Mellon, and Rockefeller Foundations. Angel-Ajani has a PhD in Anthropology and an MFA in Creative Writing and is currently Director of the Women and Genders Studies department at the City College of New York, where she lives with her family.