Veronica Chambers’ “Ida in Love and in Trouble” (2024, Little Brown) is a historic fiction that holds closely to the young-adult life of journalist and civil-rights activist Ida B. Wells. Ida was born into slavery in 1862 and was freed as an infant under the Emancipation Proclamation.
In 1885, the intelligent, beautiful and flirtatious Ida became part of the first generation of elite free Black people. She started college at Shaw University, but when her parents died of yellow fever, she had to quit school and fend for herself. This young Black woman who spoke her mind found obstacles galore in her quest to develop her career and find love.
The author takes from Wells’ diaries and autobiography to track some of her suitors and her vibrant editorial newspaper articles. Wells uses her pen to fight the injustice that occurs in the post-Civil War South and the age of lynching.
With her fairer skin and straight hair, Ida was among the privileged in the Black community — a “blue vein” — and had advantages in the White world as well. She also attracted the gaze of elite Black men, whether they themselves were very dark-skinned or not.
Also in her favor, the author says: “This was the heyday of the Black press, and readers supported hundreds of newspapers across the country.”
It was a good time to be a Black journalist. As a freelance writer, her work was read nationwide. Not only did she opine about race issues, but women’s issues, which raised some hackles.
In addition to being a journalist, she taught school to make ends meet, but her heart was in her writing. As well as in her suitors. She writes in her diary that she’d ousted Isaiah, then charming Louis, in favor of Charles Morris. But he was in Washington, D.C., and she was in Memphis, Tenn., which meant the courtship flourished mainly in letters, which we can still read today.
Ida toured Britain to raise people’s awareness of lynching in America and to gain support to fight this appalling racial violence. She moved to Chicago and would eventually marry fellow activist and lawyer Frederick Lee Barnett.
Ida B. Wells was a big-hearted dynamo, and the reader will learn a lot about her life and the times as they’re pulled along by her trials and successes as well as her romances.
Patricia Hruby Powell is the author of the award-winning books “Josephine, “Lift As You Climb,” “Loving vs Virginia” and “Struttin’ With Some Barbecue,” all signed and for sale at the Jane Addams Book Shop. Her forthcoming books are about women’s suffrage, Martha Graham, Ella Fitzgerald and waterfowl.
