COLLECTIVE Book Club | May 2026 Reflection

What Passes as Love by Trisha R. Thomas

Some books ask us to consider love. Others ask us to consider freedom.

Our May COLLECTIVE Book Club pick, What Passes as Love, asks us to sit in the uncomfortable space where the two collide, while also asking what happens when survival requires us to become someone else entirely.

Set in 1850s Virginia, Trisha R. Thomas introduces us to Dahlia Holt, a young enslaved woman born on the plantation of Lewis Holt, who is both her father and enslaver! Dahlia is one of nearly a dozen children Holt fathers with enslaved women on his property. Light-skinned enough to pass as white, she is brought into the main house as a girl to work as a ladies’ maid.

From the beginning, Dahlia exists between worlds. She is not white, although she can be perceived as such. She is enslaved, yet her work inside the Holt household separates her from parts of the enslaved community into which she was born.

Dahlia is Lewis Holt’s daughter, but she can never publicly occupy the place of a daughter.

She belongs everywhere and nowhere.

And before Dahlia ever becomes Lily Dove, Thomas has already introduced one of the novel’s central questions:

What happens to our sense of self when the world refuses to make room for all of who we are?

When Freedom Presents Itself

At sixteen, Dahlia accompanies the Holt family into town, where she meets Timothy Ross, a young Englishman who assumes she is white. Their encounter changes the trajectory of her life. Timothy proposes marriage, and Dahlia recognizes something much larger than romance in his offer. Dahlia accepts his proposal, reinvents herself as Lily Dove, and leaves behind the plantation and the identity the world assigned her, all for a new life on Timothy’s estate. This was an extraordinary gamble!

But what does “choice” really mean when one option is continued enslavement?

Dahlia’s decision became one of the most compelling parts of our discussion because it is easy, from the distance and safety of another time, to ask what she should have done.

It is harder to ask: What choices were actually available to her?

Sometimes survival does not look heroic.

Sometimes it looks like calculation ... adaptation ... silence ... reinvention. Sometimes survival means walking through the only open door.

Becoming Lily Dove

Marriage may remove Dahlia from one form of captivity, but becoming Lily Dove creates another. Her freedom depends upon secrecy, as she must hide her parentage, her history, her relationships, and her Blackness. Even the physical evidence her own body carries, the scar on her back, she must work desperately to conceal.

Life as Lily is precarious almost immediately. Her mother-in-law is suspicious. Her brother-in-law’s unwanted advances create another threat. The enslaved workers on the estate begin to recognize that there is more to Lily’s story than she admits, and that knowledge becomes its own form of leverage.

Dahlia has escaped the Holt plantation. But she has not escaped fear! She soon comes to know that freedom from something is not necessarily the same as freedom to be yourself.

The Psychological Cost of Passing

Racial passing sits at the center of the novel, but Thomas invites us to think beyond what Dahlia gains by "passing" and consider what it costs her.

As Lily, she gains access to a world that would otherwise be closed to her. She gets to experience safety, marriage, social standing, mobility, and possibility.

But access is not the same as belonging. There is something profoundly lonely about being welcomed into a space only because the people in it do not know who you really are. Dahlia must constantly calculate:

Who knows?

Who suspects?

What can she say?

What must she hide?

Who can be trusted?

Where is she safe?

That kind of vigilance may help a person survive, but it does not necessarily allow a person to rest or thrive. We learn which parts of ourselves make other people comfortable and which parts should remain tucked away. Dahlia’s passing carries life-or-death consequences, but the emotional question underneath it is one worth sitting with:

What happens to us when belonging requires performance?

And Then Comes Bo

Dahlia’s carefully constructed life becomes even more complicated when Timothy unknowingly purchases Bo, Dahlia’s childhood best friend from the Holt plantation, where he had worked as a horse breeder and driver. Bo knows Dahlia, but not Lily. He knows where she came from. He knows who she was before Timothy, and his arrival brings Dahlia face-to-face with something she has worked desperately to leave behind: her own history.

Their reconnection also rekindles old feelings, adding another layer to an already impossible situation. Bo represents forbidden love, but his presence forces Dahlia to confront the moral cost of her freedom. And when Bo's life is endangered, Dahlia faces an excruciating choice: How much of her own safety she is willing to risk for someone she loves?

That question stayed with us because survival often demands self-preservation. But love asks something different. Loyalty asks something different. Community asks something different. And sometimes those demands collide.

What Passes as Love?

What, exactly, passes as love?

Not simply Love.

But what passes as love.

The word passes carries more than one meaning here. Dahlia passes as white, but throughout the story, we are also asked to consider what else might pass as love.

Protection. Possession. Desire. Security. Dependence. Obligation. Sacrifice.

Being needed. Being provided for. Being wanted.

All of these can resemble love, but are they love?

And can love ever be fully separated from power?

Is it love if there is no freedom? Is protection the same as love? Is being provided for the same as being cherished? Can someone love you while participating in, or benefiting from, a system that denies your humanity? And perhaps most importantly, can love truly exist where one person does not have the power to freely choose it?

When Everything Threatens to Unravel

As the novel moves toward its climax, the fragile walls around Lily Dove begin closing in. A birth register threatens to reveal Dahlia’s true parentage. The scar on her back could expose the truth her clothing conceals. A bank robbery complicates an already dangerous situation.

A bounty hunter closes in. And Bo’s life hangs in the balance.

What Dahlia has constructed through careful choices, silence, and performance threatens to collapse all at once. She is no longer simply trying to escape slavery. She is now trying to protect a freedom that can be taken away the moment someone discovers who she really is. And that may be one of the cruelest realities the novel exposes: a freedom that depends upon someone else’s ignorance is never entirely secure.

The Freedom to Be Known

For us, Dahlia’s journey ultimately became about more than physical freedom. It became about the freedom to exist as one’s whole self.

To be known.

To be safe.

To belong without performing.

To love without fear.

To be loved without pretending.

This is where What Passes as Love connected so naturally to our conversations about wellness and aafiyah - wholeness.

Wellness is not simply the absence of immediate danger. It is also the presence of safety. The ability to exhale, to rest, to live without constantly scanning the room, to inhabit your own story without fear that someone discovering the truth of who you are could destroy the life you have built.

Dahlia may become Lily to survive.

But survival and wholeness are not necessarily the same thing.

What Opened the Room

One of the ideas that stayed with us was the difference between escaping something and becoming free! Dahlia escapes, but freedom continues to require negotiation.

We can leave a place and still carry it.

We can survive an experience and still organize our lives around protecting ourselves from experiencing it again.

And we can achieve the thing we once prayed for and discover that healing requires something more.

Survival asks: How do I get out?

Wholeness eventually asks: Who am I now that I am here?

A COLLECTIVE Reflection

What stayed with us was Dahlia’s insistence on imagining that another life might be possible.

Before freedom becomes something we can reach, sometimes it has to become something we can imagine. And for an enslaved Black girl in 1850s Virginia, even imagining herself beyond the boundaries assigned to her was an act of resistance.

What Passes as Love refuses to make freedom simple. Every door Dahlia walks through carries another question. Every identity provides something and costs something. Every relationship forces us to examine the difference between being wanted and being known.

Closing Reflection

As we closed our discussion of What Passes as Love, several questions lingered:

What does love look like when we are truly free to choose it?

What does freedom mean if we cannot safely be "known"?

And how much of ourselves should we ever have to surrender in exchange for belonging?

Maybe real love does not require us to disappear.

Maybe it does not ask us to become smaller, quieter, easier, or more acceptable in exchange for belonging.

Maybe love, at its healthiest, creates room.

Room for truth, room for dignity, room for choice, room for safety, and room to remain ourselves.

Dahlia’s story takes place more than 175 years ago, but some of the questions it raises are not confined to history. In this day and age, what are we calling love or freedom? Where are we merely surviving or performing in order to belong? And where are we free enough to be whole?

Perhaps that is one of the gifts of stories like this. They remind us that freedom is more than escaping what confines us. Sometimes freedom is finally being able to stand fully inside who we are.

And to be loved there.

To join the COLLECTIVE Book Club, send a text message (WhatsApp preferred) to (202) 770-9119 or email Contact@AafiyahCollective.com. We would love to have you in the room.