Tempie's Deed

A laid-off museum curator inherits a four-hundred-acre South Carolina plantation—and discovers she descends from both the enslaver who built it and the woman he enslaved. Drowning in back taxes and facing a lawsuit from a white heir who wants the land returned to "the family," Althea Pryor launches a radical experiment: charging wealthy guests five hundred dollars a day to perform plantation labor. But when a suppressed deed reveals a theft of land older than anyone imagined, Thea must decide whether she's built a reckoning—or just another kind of erasure.