Earlier this year, Jacquie Abram was driving around Colorado Springs, selling copies of her little-known novel from the trunk of a car.
Six months later, her book, Hush Money: How One Woman Proved Systemic Racism in her Workplace and Kept her Job, has grown into an award-winning international bestseller recently featured in Forbes magazine.
“It’s pretty surreal,” Abram said of her book’s growing popularity. “But more than that, I feel like the book is helping people, which is what we set out to do in the first place.”
Last year, compelled by years of experience with workplace discrimination and a broadened national dialogue concerning race relations, Abram and her daughters, Deborah and Delilah Harris, decided to write Hush Money despite the fact that none of them had a literary background.
“I’m not a writer; I’m a number cruncher,” said Abram, whose professional background is in finance. “But we felt we had an important story to tell.”
The book, which is “inspired by real events,” tells the story of Ebony, a young Black divorcee who, after a series of dead-end jobs, finally finds employment that can help her support her son and sick mother. Soon after she takes the job, however, she finds herself besieged by racial harassment, both subtle and overt. Traumatized by a hostile and corrosive work environment, the young woman is nearly driven to suicide before she decides to fight back.
Abram said she and her daughters were trying to target three groups of readers: employees of color who suffer from racial harassment and aren’t sure how to confront it; people who’ve never experienced systemic racism, but would like to become allies; and “employers and organizations who want to build a diverse and inclusive working environment.”
Word of mouth and positive reviews have catapulted the book’s popularity to a level Abram never dreamed possible, she said.
“We have readers in New Zealand, the United Kingdom, France, Ireland, Canada, Australia and even Finland,” Abram said. “And I’m not sure there are many Black people in Finland.”
The book recently received a gold medal in the 2021 Readers’ Favorite international book award contest and has hundreds of 5-star reviews on Amazon, Abram said.
Abram’s life has undergone a sea change over the past few months, she said. In addition to being profiled in Forbes, she fields multiple interview requests from radio and podcasts hosts. She has begun a new career as an “antiracism consultant,” working with organizations and individuals on how to identify and combat workplace racism. Also, she and her daughters have penned a sequel to their debut novel, titled Hush Money: The Cost of Being Black in Corporate America. Their second book, which will be released later this month, picks up where the first novel left off, Abrams said.
“The story was so powerful that it couldn’t be condensed into one book,” said Abram, who currently lives in Aurora. “Just because (the protagonist) kept her job, doesn’t mean that her fight is over.”
This content was originally published here.