Summary

Alyssa Cole’s novel When No One Is Watching begins with an epigraph quoting Zora Neale Hurston and W.E.B. Du Bois. Hurston comments on the “white neighbor” who views acquisition as a game, and Du Bois comments on the problematic nature of historical accounts that belie true facts (viii).

The novel begins with a prologue narrated in first-person by Sydney Green. Sydney describes her shock at discovering “a slavery theme park that’d opened in Brooklyn at the end of the nineteenth century,” followed by her obsessive habit of uncovering similar dark histories related to race relations along the east coast (1). This habit compels Sydney to sign up for a tour of historic brownstones in her own neighborhood, Gifford Place. Sydney considers the tour a distraction from recent events in Seattle, though she does not explain what happened. Sydney interrupts...