When police officers kill 17-year-old Darius Evers, his older cousin, Nate, a political activist, wants real justice, not just “another Twitter hashtag, another candlelight vigil, another graffiti memorial.” He starts reading up on older killings — “lynchings, primarily” — and bands together with Darius’s brother, Joshua, and two close friends to begin kidnapping descendants of people who had long ago committed racially motivated hate crimes. The four of them don’t free their victims until they’ve agreed to deposit hundreds of dollars weekly into a secret account. “We like to think of it as a community-building fund,” Nate tells one. “But you can consider it reparations.”Their plan works, until the day it catastrophically doesn’t, putting them all in the frame of white supremacists and vengeful cops. As everything goes up in flames, Mayfield leans all the way into the discomfort zone.

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Persons: Darius Evers, Nate, ”, Darius’s, Joshua, they’ve, Mayfield