In 2018, Professor Princess Joy L. Perry was walking up the long driveway of Thomas Jefferson's Poplar Forest retreat in Lynchburg. The second home of the country's third president had been built and tended to by the enslaved.
Perry felt a weight hit her, unlike anything she had felt before.
"I asked myself, how did the enslaved survive it? And what made them want to survive it?"
Perry, a master lecturer in composition, literature and creative writing at Old Dominion University, said she's always been fascinated by slavery. She is known to drag her friends to former plantations throughout Virginia. That day, however, Perry envisioned lines of enslaved people being sold, hauled away and crying, and she finally understood the full impact of bondage.
"I thought, 'What if it were your family on that cart? For me, the saddest part is that you can’t call, you can’t write, there’s no last name and no one cares to inform you about how they are,” Perry said. “To me, that’s one of the cruelest parts of slavery; having to live your entire life not knowing where your family is.”
The idea became her debut and highly acclaimed novel, "This Here is Love." The New York Times included it in its list of the Best Historical Fiction of 2025. It has also been longlisted for the 2026 Aspen Words Literary Prize.
Perry was born in Newport News but was raised in what she calls "Jesse Helms' North Carolina." Helms was the state's longest-serving senator before his death in 2008 and was a polarizing figure known for opposing racial desegregation.
Her experiences with racial injustices influenced her writing; her fascination with the written word, though, goes back to winning her first writing contest in the second grade.
As an adult, she moved back to Hampton Roads, a region with a unique history. In 1619, the first Africans brought to a British North American colony landed in present-day Hampton and the eventual race-based slavery system took root.
She began writing "This Here is Love" a decade ago.
“I live in Norfolk and this is what I know now. The past is right here and the line between us is thin,” Perry said. “We’re taught the defiance and resistance started with the Civil Rights Movement, but one of the things I’m reaching for with this book is that the defiance was already there from the very beginning in 1619.”
The book is set in southeastern Virginia in 1692, as chattel slavery was flourishing; slave codes made slavery an inherited status, passed down from mother to child.
Characters, such as David Cabarrus and Bless, are considered property but refuse to accept that status. For Andrew Cabarrus, physical bondage is under negotiation: He is free but fights to buy his family’s freedom. Meanwhile, he meets free and enslaved Blacks who have chosen to forget the loved ones they've been separated from in order to maintain their sanity. Perry juxtaposes their wellspring of emotions against the slave master’s belief that the enslaved are animals.
The story shows that familial ties were a privilege many men and women couldn’t afford. The stoic demeanors of the characters reminded Perry of her grandmother, who employed the same survival technique.
“I remember her being loving, but not being affectionate,” Perry said. “She showed love in different ways … So much of it makes sense now.”
In Perry’s novel, women control their reproductive power. It’s a concept rooted in African matriarchal communities and personified by Patience, a midwife brought from Africa. It intrigued Perry to develop characters born and raised on the continent, who had to adapt to a life of enslavement.
“It was fascinating to me that they brought slaves who had the skills they needed,” Perry said. “I was also intrigued by the fact that they were born free. It takes incredible strength to say, 'This is what I have now and I have to make the best of it.’ The first generation of enslaved people were severed from everything they knew and we don’t talk about that first generation. I don’t know if I could have survived it.”
Patience teaches the enslaved women on a Norfolk plantation how to avoid getting pregnant so that they can keep a little autonomy. Perry demonstrates that their choices were just as detrimental to their well-being, if not more so, than those of freed people.
While researching the book, Perry was astounded by slave owners' accounts that described the people that they relied on for their lives, their children, as subhuman.
“You have people picking cotton from sunup to sundown, yet you say they’re lazy? How are you going to say I’m not human, but have me nurse your babies?” Perry said. “There’s some kind of mental gymnastics going on and when you see it on the page, you say this doesn’t make sense, but our historical reality says they wanted to have it both ways.”
But the love the enslaved had for themselves and for each other was proof of their humanity; hence the book's title, “This Here is Love.”
Through her intricate storytelling, Perry demonstrates that their love was the most powerful form of rebellion.
“It was transformative knowing they always resisted.”