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.
