Soul Purpose - Hardcover

Dr. Kele Sewell’s Soul Purpose presents two stories, one fiction and one based on historical fact, but both delving into the depths of hatred racism brings. In 1965 rural Georgia, blacks couldn’t eat in the same restaurants or share bathrooms with the white population. Kelly, a young Caucasian boy, grew up in Forsyth County, Georgia. The son of an alcoholic and racist father, Kelly’s formative years were charged with the racial hatred of that era. But Kelly’s mother was different; she instead told her son about the importance of viewing individuals as equals―no matter the color of their skin. Kelly’s life could have gone toward ignorance and hatred or toward understanding. Luckily, he meets an African American psychiatrist, Dr. Hubble. With that introduction and his mother’s guidance, Kelly is able to break the cycle of racism that plagued his family’s history. Decades earlier, in 1912 in the same community, a white woman named Mae Crowe was raped and murdered. Her father, also the local district attorney, sentenced two black men to a public hanging for the crime. Race riots broke out, forcing the community’s black citizens to sell their homes for a fraction of their value and leave the county. Sewell’s noteworthy novel artfully blends fact and fiction to give the reader a greater understanding of racism spanning the last century. Its message is a significant, social commentary about the necessity of healing deep racial wounds, both real and imagined, to bring about change.