The Peach Seed

On a routine day, Fletcher Dukes drives his older sister, Olga, who is losing her sight, to do weekly grocery shopping at the Piggly Wiggly.

On the liquor aisle, they pass a tall woman, head bowed reading a wine label.

Fletcher smells her perfume first, then sees a strawberry birthmark on the nape of a woman’s neck and knows at once that this is his lost love, Altovise Benson.

Fletcher and Altovise risked their lives together in sit-ins and marches, but their plan to marry was interrupted when the police turned a peaceful protest violent.

The two were jailed in different towns leading to a separation that would ultimately span 52 years.

Before Altovise’s departure, Fletcher carves her a peach seed monkey with diamond eyes.

As we learn via harrowing flashbacks to 1800’s Senegal, an undiscovered Dukes ancestor who was sold into slavery carved the first monkey - the Peach Seed Monkey that forms the talismanic tradition, the rite of passage, that each generation of Dukes man gifts to his son on his 13th birthday - along with the tools and knowledge to carve them himself.

By giving one to Altovise Fletcher initiates a physical and spiritual break in a tradition that like the Civil Rights Movement irrevocably shapes the lives of future generations including a Fletcher’s daughters, his grandson, Bo-D and a constellation of Dukes in the present.