A Blue Note
a blue note
2022
Pauletta is a new PhD in History with a brilliant mind and academic scars she’s struggling to hide. In the summer after her tense graduation, she has a prestigious postdoctoral fellowship meant to prepare her to find a tenure track job she’s not even sure she wants. Instead of stacking her CV, Pauletta only wants to immerse in the history of her people.
1930s New York
Paule Campbell was born with Jazz in her veins. Her love of music took her from a rural town in Georgia all the way to New York in the throes of the Harlem Renaissance, a place where she could finally be herself — a fat, masculine, lesbian trumpet player with big dreams and a bigger heart. Soon after her arrival, she makes the intimate acquaintance of Amy Delphine, another Southern transplant pinning her dreams on art to escape the realities of Jim Crow.
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During an all too short summer in the archives, Pauletta traces Paule and Amy’s tender love story through Paule’s letters home and Amy’s poetry and journals, unwittingly finding the courage to accept her own pain without being defined by it and open her heart to a life and love she was too afraid to hope could be hers.
Content Warnings
Mentions of lynching
Mentions of suicide
Mentions of disordered eating
Depression
Negative and ableist self-talk