Between the River and the Railroad Tracks

Meticulously crafted and unflinchingly vulnerable, Nicole R. Fleetwood’s multigenerational family portrait braids the intimate life of a neighborhood with the historic arc that shaped it to offer an untold story of the black Midwest.

In 1973, Hamilton, Ohio, was a mill town so typical it prided itself on being quintessentially American. In harder times, it proved to be a bellwether. Here, young Nicole is born into a fourth-generation household in the second ward, a segregated neighborhood between the river and the railroad tracks.

In this tight-knit community, most of Nicole’s neighbors are like her relatives: large, intergenerational families a few decades up from the South. They build their own institutions, create music with global influence, and uphold a code of conduct centered around safety and belonging.  

But the legacy of slavery and the entrenched racism of the Midwest cast a shadow over the second ward. The Fleetwoods bear their struggles as an ancestral curse, one that dooms their menfolk and burdens their women. The family lore echoes in Nicole’s earliest memories. 

As Nicole grows up, the curse spreads through her community. She witnesses the second ward undergo devastating changes that impact her family and neighbors. The loss of factory jobs, growing political divides, and the crack epidemic wreak havoc, seeping through the walls of her family home and replacing the sense of community and familiarity with destitution and violence.  

Nicole nurtures her intellectual curiosity and independence, dreaming of college and the world beyond. But she fears that leaving the second ward means abandoning everything she’s known—the neighborhood map that kept her safe, the community that raised her, and the family that loves her. In a powerful testament to black love and inheritance, Between the River and the Railroad Tracks asks whether we can ever leave home.

• Praise for Marking Time:
  Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award
  A Smithsonian Book of the Year
  A New York Review of Books “Best of 2020” Selection
• “Profoundly revisionist.”
  National Book Critics Circle
• “[An] absorbing book…Fleetwood seeks to revise the mainstream media narrative.”
  New York Times Book Review
• “Elucidating the cultural and aesthetic significance of visual art created by incarcerated people.”
  MacArthur Foundation
• “[Fleetwood] brings together an impressive array of paintings, sculptures, murals, and photos that speak to the impact of incarceration on American life…In amplifying the stories of those marked by incarceration, she makes visible the individuals and families the carceral state has tried so hard to disappear and silence.”
  Los Angeles Review of Books
• “[An] ambitious book…Fleetwood deftly weaves personal narrative together with nuanced readings of artworks created by incarcerated people…She models how creative expression can build the coalitions necessary for imagining and realizing a more just society.”
  Smithsonian
• “An urgently political text…Fleetwood’s analysis follows a narrative arc that moves across artistic mediums and within the physical architecture of prison itself…Marking Time moves fluidly between this art historical survey and a sharp attention to the social apparatuses that have enabled the very foundation of the prison state.”
  The Nation
• “Marking Time is a tremendous achievement… It is the kind of book that stays with you long after you finish, inspiring change in us all.”
  Elizabeth Hinton, author of America on Fire