Martin Redmon

 
PROJECT IN PROGRESS

Synopsis

ISABELLE’S POINT begins in 1951 along the Cumberland River in southern Kentucky, where William, a recently widowed, middle-aged farmer, is losing his land to the building of a dam and his sense of reality to depression. He finds a kindred spirit when he discovers a crate of old books in his attic. For a hundred years, the family has kept secret the life revealed in these diaries of his great-grandmother, Isabelle: her estrangement from her family, her failed marriage, a fortune left to her by a benefactor, and her love for Gibeau, a Black man thirty years her senior. When William suddenly finds himself drawn into a relationship with a Black woman, he pursues the reading of Isabelle’s story with heightened urgency, hoping to find the strength from her example to stand defiantly against the Appalachian mores that are keeping him from happiness. Isabelle’s story unveils to William a fateful intertwining of his life with hers and a promising future he could never have predicted.