A NOVEL BY J.C. SAMUELS
Young, Black & Immortal
Enter Meridian House, A Fulmore Estate.
A family inheritance opens onto something far older: a lineage of power, ancestral record, impossible survival, and worlds whose boundaries were drawn long before the Fulmores knew they were standing near them.
Meridian House sits at the center of the story, but it is not the edge of it.
Young, Black & Immortal — The Visual
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THE PROLOGUE · THE MALDIVES
Where It Begins
Eve and Hêlêl arrive in the Maldives, where the Indian Ocean glows with bioluminescent water and the first pieces of a much larger inheritance begin to stir.
The Fulmores do not know this world yet. The reader does.
THE STORY
A three-thousand-year-old debt has come due.
The Fulmores believe they have inherited land, opportunity, and a new beginning. What they have actually inherited is something far older: a bloodline threaded with impossible power, a house positioned at the edge of multiple realms, and a history that refuses to remain buried.
A mysterious letter opens the door to Meridian House—and beyond it, to bigger worlds, older gods, celestial powers, ancient accords, and forces whose names have survived only in fragments.
Soon, the Fulmores are drawn into an ancient conflict alongside forces older than empires. And that is only one realm.
For the Fulmore family, immortality will not mean escaping the past. It will mean inheriting all of it.
It’s a good time to be young, Black & immortal.
The family
Nala and her siblings return to a place loaded with memory, expectation, and unfinished business. The emotional inheritance is as consequential as the financial one.
The records
Deeds, trusts, letters, and archival material turn family history into something concrete. A page can reveal as much as a room.
The threshold
Meridian House is where the family first encounters evidence that their inheritance reaches beyond property and money into a much older world.
FROM THE AXUM ARCHIVES
Tituba Anacaona
Some records were never intended for public keeping.
Tituba Anacaona belongs to a history larger than Meridian House—a history of ancestral witness, protective power, and forces the living do not fully understand.
The woman she would become is one matter.
The surviving record of her early maturation is another.
At thirteen, Tituba Anacaona’s crown had already begun behaving in ways the Axum could no longer classify as ordinary. The surviving record documents its maturation.
The elders did not debate whether power was present. Only its measure remained in question.
Protective movement preceded conscious command. Gold charms responded during activation. No fear noted.
Three ways in
The house is only one threshold.
Meet the Fulmores
Family, inheritance, ambition, grief, and power—each of them carrying a different part of what was left behind.
Enter Meridian House
The Fulmore estate holds records, rooms, inheritances, and histories that do not surrender themselves all at once.
Open the larger world
Ancestors, immortals, ancient accords, and powers whose histories began long before Meridian House had a name.
BEYOND MERIDIAN
Hêlêl
She is not of Meridian House, though the house knows her when she arrives.
Older than its foundations and answerable to forces beyond the Fulmore line, Hêlêl moves between worlds with the ease of someone who remembers when their boundaries were first drawn.
Meridian House does not keep Hêlêl. It makes room for her.
FROM THE WRITING ROOM
The world existed before the grief. But I am building it differently now.
I have been building Young, Black & Immortal for a long time. For years, pieces of this world arrived in flashes—characters I wanted to meet, images I wanted to see, histories I wished existed on the page, Black people allowed to be ancient and powerful and strange and impossibly wealthy and immortal.
In the midst of immense loss, I have found myself returning to this story again and again. Sometimes I am writing, and sometimes, if I am being truthful, I am retreating. There is comfort in entering a world where death is not necessarily the end of a story and where ancestors can still have something to say.
I don’t know that I began building this world because I needed a refuge. I know that, now, it has become one.
— J.C. Samuels
THE STORY OPENS OUTWARD
Inheritance was only the beginning.
The Fulmores begin with a house, a trust, and the records left behind. What follows reaches into ancestry, immortality, old agreements, and histories that make Meridian House feel very young.
Meet the family at the center of it, follow the archive, and step into the larger world of Young, Black & Immortal.