Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills is a novel that tells the story of a black neighborhood built and supported by the manipulative and mysterious Nedeed family. The first Luther Nedeed to arrive from the South bought the apparently worthless land and established his undertaker's business there. Each succeeding generation of Nedeeds consisted of one son who was the exact image of his father and bore the same first name. The first Nedeeds had hoped to defy the white world and the white God by establishing the worth of the black people who lived in Linden Hills. They devoted all their efforts to building up the neighborhood and ensuring that as it improved, and the land became extremely valuable, it remained in the hands of African Americans. But the current Luther Nedeed had become convinced that there was nothing that black people could do to truly change their lot. The people in Linden Hills were, in his estimation, merely white people disguised. As he saw it, "Linden Hills wasn't black; it was successful" (17). It is the denial of blackness in pursuit of whiteness that is the illusion that the people in Linden Hills are encouraged to pursue. By cutting themselves off from their past, Naylor argues, they are making the present and future empty.
The self-hatred of this Nedeed motivated his desire to create a neighborhood which would continue to look like a black success story but would actually ensure, through the careful selection of tenants for the thousand-year leases, the ruin of those who lived there. As Nedeed saw it, "let them think that they were proving something to the world, to themselves, or to him about their worth" (17) He would select those who believed themselves to be connected to their history and would enjoy "watching their bewilderment as it all melted away the farther they came down" (17). Like Satan, a former angel who defied God, the current Luther Nedeed took great pleasure in tempting the people and h...