#religious-authority

#religious-authority

Dominion , the debut novel from Addie E. Citchens, takes its title most obviously from its setting: the fictional town of Dominion, Mississippi, a small town where the prominent Winfrey family holds a preeminent social and spiritual position in the Black community. But the title also has another meaning, because this is a novel about degrees of power and privilege, and who is permitted dominion over whom.

As a child, Ruth is eccentric and absent-minded, and her mother often accuses her of "buddling," meaning "to waste time on little jobs; to fuss, to fiddle, to sit in a corner skinning twigs with the edge of a spoon instead of tidying up." When Ruth is older, her mother's warning turns prophetic: she spends much of her adult life doing odd tasks, only now at the behest of her church, which puts her to work digging fencepost holes.