Dominion

Reverend Sabre Winfrey, Jr., pastor of Seven Seals Missionary Baptist Church, believes in God, his own privilege, and the power of enterprise. In Dominion, Mississippi, he owns the barbershop and the radio station and keeps a firm grip on nearly every corner of community life. Alongside his wife, Priscilla, he has raised five sons. The youngest, Emanuel (known as Wonderboy) is the family’s golden child: gifted, beautiful, impossibly fast, and impossible to ignore.

But beneath Dominion’s polished surface, the Reverend’s power, and the systems that sustain it, are far from righteous. When Wonderboy has an unexpected encounter with a stranger, he is forced to confront questions about himself, his family, and the world he has inherited. What follows sends shock waves through the community and threatens to expose the secrets holding its most powerful people together.

Priscilla and Diamond, two women who love these men, see both their tenderness and their cruelty. Through their eyes, Dominion becomes an intimate portrait of the ways secrets govern us, shame silences us, and silence makes us complicit. It is also a story about the complicated ways love can bind us to the everyday violence and quiet sins of those who hold power.

Brilliantly crafted and deeply felt, Addie E. Citchens’s Dominion is a gripping Black Southern family drama alive with humor, tenderness, and hard-won truth. With the force of the women at its heart, it explores the brutal ways fear and patriarchy shape our lives, and asks what it takes to finally break free.