Dream Country

DREAM COUNTRY is divided into five sections, each one highlighting members of five generations of an African American family. In the first section, set in Minneapolis in 2008, 17-year-old Kollie Flomo has become such a problem for his immigrant parents that they've decided to send him back to Liberia, the country they'd left seeking refuge from a violent civil war. The second section is the story of Kollie's ancestor Togar as a teenager. It's 1926 and Togar, a new husband and father, has fled his village to escape being forced to work on plantations owned by the Congo people -- the name given to free African Americans who settled in Liberia beginning in the 1820s. Upon arriving in Liberia, it seems those African Americans were quick to label the indigenous people as "savages" and set about dominating them much as plantation owners in the U.S. had once dominated them. The third section flashes back to 1827 Virginia as Yasmine, a young widow with four children, has left the planation where they were "workers" (not slaves) and walked with her family to Norfolk, where abolitionists arrange passage for them to Liberia. Yasmine prospers, becoming one of the most important landowners in the capital. But her daughter, Lani, falls in love with a Bassa man (one of the "savages") and, to her mother's horror, goes to live with his family. Kollie's father, Ujay Flomo, is the central figure in the fourth section, which begins in 1980. He's a political activist, a dangerous thing when the Congo people are cracking down on any dissent from indigenous people like the Bassas. His activism will eventually lead to his fleeing the country and living in a refugee camp in Ghana before immigrating with his family to the U.S. The last section is written in 2018 by Kollie's sister, Angel, and brings readers up to date on what has happened to the family.