We all have them. In truth, I don’t know a single Black queer person who doesn’t: body secrets. Intimations, manifested as figurative or literal scar tissue. Dark, cavernous voids, scattered across years of memories. The answers to questions we’ve rehearsed over the course of a lifetime to avoid saying the things we cannot say.
For me, the question“where is home for you?”is a landmine. I’ve learned how to tiptoe around it, sticking to vague characterizations. “I was raised bicoastal,” I have often heard myself saying, “. . . partially in North Carolina and partially in Southern California.” Though the fastidious listener will note that the question is not “where were you raised” but where is home? This is a most complicated question for someone who has spent the better part of their adult life moving, uprooting, rebuilding, and reimagining themselves. For me, home is wherever I happen to reside at a given moment. Perhaps even less romantic: home is the place where my items are currently stored. When I left for college, I promised myself that I would never, ever move back to the southern middle-class suburb where I spent many of my formative years. It would take another six years, however, for me finally to cut ties with one of my parents, leaving behind complicated memories of an abusive household and the time in my life before I had the agency to live on my own terms.
Like the main character in Denne Michele Norris’s When The Harvest Comes (Random House, 2025)—whom we will refer to as Davis Freeman, although naming and renamingbecomes pivotal to this moving account of returning to self—I have spent much of my adult life running from specters of the past, building new definitions of “self” and “family” that feel like a salve for the hurt I suffered as a kid. In early adolescence, it quickly crystalized that my Blackness and particular performance of gender nonconforming queerness would make me simultaneously hyper-visible and invisible, both at home and while moving through the world.
Similarly, the narrative woven by Norris about a person whose two worlds—and in a way, two selves—elide is a tale of foils. Davis and Everett, though partners well-suited for one another in the paradigmatic “opposites attract” sort of way, illuminate the tensions and contradictions within and surrounding their relationships through their juxtaposition. Davis is small, Black, effete, stoic, anxious, and often deeply insular. He is a Juilliard-educated violist who is blossoming in the elite world of orchestral performance, a lifelong dream coming to fruition. In his personal life, though, he struggles to fully embrace the happiness he’s created for himself. Always with one leery eye on the past, which seems to loom ominously overhead, Davis suspects he is unworthy of the soft and fulfilling life with Everett that is unfolding around him. “People like me,” he says at one point, “We don’t get the guy. We don’t end up married with 2.5 children and a white picket fence and matching SUVs. And when we do, we don’t end up married to this guy.” By “this guy,” he means Everett: broad, white, classically masculine, fiercely protective, and emotionally secure, compared to Davis. Everett’s biggest hope is providing Davis with a sense of all-encompassing safety: “Shit is only getting more and more dangerous,” Everett says. “But when it comes to us? You’re going to be safe with me, Davis—mind, body, and spirit.” Throughout the text, the story of their love unfurls alongside intermittent vignettes centered on their relationships with their families of origin.
Davis’s father, referred to almost exclusively as “The Reverend” (an important signifier of how Davis views him throughout the story), is a perfect counterbalance to Christopher, Everett’s father. The fathers and the children they’ve raised but struggle to understand fully are moving on perpendicular trajectories of self-discovery. As such, they are destined to collide at the junctures most challenging to their core beliefs and intimate desires.
The book’s biggest strength is its ability to play with time while creating emotional fissures within symbiotic relationships, forcing each character to wrestle with their unmanicured interiorities. Christopher, a self-aggrandizing centrist democrat who loves his son and entire family with the ferocity of a mother grizzly bear, struggles to acknowledge how his perceptions of his loved ones are, in fact, projections of his ideals. In the end he must admit, if only in the privacy of his mind, that masculinity is what allows him to embrace his son’s queer identity and partnership to Davis while still feeling like the patriot and patriarch he views himself to be. Davis’s overt femininity is not particularly challenging to Christopher because his perception of Everett is conventionally masculine and male. Internally, Christopher suspects that the circumstances inverted would trouble him immensely, reflecting that the hypothetical scenario and accompanying fear is,“Entirely theoretical, given the way things are, but real and present all the same. Because it would be his shame—Christopher’s, no one else’s—that would volcanically erupt their family if Davis’s and Everette’s roles were reversed.”
In Christopher, I see etchings of my own father: a man who means well, loves hard, but can’t always step outside of his own perspective to see things as they are, not as he desires them to be. Our relationship, not unlike the one Christopher and Everett share, weathered many seasons of growing pains as I sought to include my dad on my personal journey of self-expansion.
Norris’s ability to create interlocking portraits of flawed but somehow still lovable characters is one of her masterful offerings. It is in the contradictions, the pain-points, where we find our potential for growth. Christopher, while willing to evolve past his prejudices, is slow-going towards vocalizing the ways in which he’d rather those around him do the changing. On the surface, he accepts his son’s new partner, but struggles reimagining a Caldwell family culture that might accommodate Davis’s guarded and comparatively reserved temperament.
Similarly, Everett, the golden-retriever-partner, flails when, just hours into their marriage, he is brought to the brink of “for better or worse” by a plot turn that would be a spoiler to mention here. A newfound distance develops between him and Davis. And, without physical intimacy to lean on, Everett moves through creeping doubts, spirals of anxiety, and slow-growing resentment toward the person he loves most. He allows his mind to trace only the outline of his biggest fear: What if Davis doesn’t open up and doesn’t come back to him?
It is Davis, though, who must stare directly into the face of his past, the face of his father, and a host of memories shrouded in shame. There were so many moments in the story that felt, for me personally, like a shock to the system, like the ice-cold water Davis prefers to drink during some of the most high-stress moments he experiences. Despite his long-term estrangement from his father and the town where he grew up, Davis’s world is turned upside down by the news he receives on his wedding day. As he struggles to regain his composure, he realizes that the reliability and comfort of his new life was built on the precarious foundation of half-truths and defense mechanisms. It’s a hard pill to swallow: Only when the past becomes a locked door, an hourglass glued to the table, do we feel the desperate need to look back and attempt to re-interpret it with new eyes.
More subtle in the text are the radical grapplings of identity and kinship bonds. While Davis identifies as male for the majority of the story, he is in regular struggle with the features of his body that mark him so—namely, the facial hair that he slowly begins to conceal with make-up. When people mistakenly call Davis “ma’am,” he begins to realize that he enjoys this presumption. At his wedding, guests struggle to map Davis into traditional wedding terminology. “Groom” or “husband” doesn’t seem right, but at this point in Davis’s gender journey, neither does “bride.” Even Everett doesn’t seem to grasp fully the breadth of his beloved’s identity turmoil until he discovers photos of Davis from their wedding day—photos featuring Davis wearing a stunning form-fitting white gown worn only briefly in secret, not the androgynous jumpsuit Everett saw him in during their ceremony.
Everett Caldwell, born “Carter” Caldwell, must also walk through his own struggle of self-definition while trying to maintain his close-knit relationships with the rest of the Caldwell clan, his boisterous all-American family. After deciding to go by his middle name—Everett—he soon realizes that even his loving, white, upper echelon family has its own painful secrets. He reflects bitterly on the stolen memories of his Uncle Everett, from whom he was kept as a child—perhaps the one queer role model who could have affirmed him in his nascent bisexuality. Then, on the morning of Davis and Everett’s wedding, it is revealed that Everett’s younger brother Caleb is considering voting for Trump in the upcoming election. Soon after, Caleb says vile things about Davis, earning him a violent rebuke from Everett and confinement to a bedroom for the duration of the ceremony. But his words cannot be confined; his vocal flirtation with the idea of voting for Trump and his unfiltered assessment of Davis as deviating from masculine ideals have already permeated the air between the Caldwell men, and most notably, infiltrated his father’s mind. As a whole, the family must ask themselves if they are the good people they view themselves to be. They must contemplate if they are willing to welcome their son’s new spouse with open arms, or if doing so may expose their own unstable identities.
Ultimately, this is a story of redemption. When The Harvest Comes invites us to see the most painful truths of ourselves and our pasts, hold them up to the sun, and let the light pass through. For much of the story, we are climbing in painful, gripping anticipation toward a crescendo, like a violist hoping the nonuniform shape of their instrument will produce the right note to carry the orchestra into harmonic symphony. Or the seconds turned minutes turned hours of a man who’s been in a car accident waiting for help to come. Or a prodigal son struggling to find the words to say that he might not be the person his father wanted him to be, might not be a son at all. Or a sister watching illness ravage the body of her mother and biggest advocate, knowing that continuing to be a dutiful daughter while providing safety for her younger sibling will require splitting herself in two.
In this text, I marveled at Norris’s propensity to provide the unexpected while also adeptly illustrate that of the deeply familiar, the uncanny. Each character, while on their own individual arc towards greater self-awareness and capaciousness for love, seems ultimately to come full circle, nestling more deeply and authentically into the contexts and relationships providing the most resonance and reassurance. Yet, there is also this—the pit in my stomach, the ache, the cost of a story that hits so close to home: As I read, I wondered if there would come a day in my own life wherein the past catches up to me. I asked myself: If left with no other option but to look directly at it, whose face would be there, staring back?
