Extending its geographical reach to both sides of the Atlantic and its chronological spectrum to cover a period of over 250 years, Phillips's novel Crossing the River (1993) traces a history of the African diaspora from the moment of contact, instigated by the slave trade, between Africa and Europe in the eighteenth century to the present day. Dedicated to those who ‘crossed the river’, the novel charts the journeys of three African descendants, two brothers and a sister, as they journey through different epochs and throughout different corners of the triangular trade - Europe, America and Africa - in their efforts to establish new places of settlement across the globe. Phillips's novel articulates the dilemmas faced by Nash Williams, a nineteenth-century black American slave-descendant, who ‘returns’ to Africa as a missionary, the plight of Martha Randolph, an ex-slave who traverses the American West as pioneer on a wagon trail, and, finally, the experiences of Travis, a black American GI, who finds himself posted to England during the Second World War. Framing these journeys is the tragic lament of the children's father, who sold them into slavery and whose voice opens the novel: ‘A desperate foolishness. The crops failed. I sold my children. I remember. I led them my children along weary paths … [to] where the tributary stumbles and swims out in all directions to meet the sea’ (CR 1). As this opening statement suggests, the future of the familial/cultural bloodline is represented metaphorically by the river, which, because of the father's actions, is allowed to disappear almost without trace into a sea of global transactions motivated by the slave trade. Crossing the River represents a perceptive engagement with the trope of ‘crossing'; the African diaspora is seen to traverse spatial and temporal zones, as it confronts social and cultural boundaries across the chasms of history and geography.

Although Phillips handles his material with integrity and sensitivity, his use of the trope of ‘crossing’ is not unique.