Annis, called Arese, is born enslaved on a Carolina rice plantation, the daughter of an enslaved woman and the white man who owns them both โ her father, and the father of the legitimate daughters who are also her half-sisters. Her mother, descended from an African warrior queen, teaches her to fight, to forage, and to survive. After her mother is sold away and Annis's one intimate bond, with Safi, is broken, Annis herself is sold south by her father and forced onto the coffle: the hundreds-of-miles march, chained with other enslaved people, to the slave markets of New Orleans and then to a brutal Louisiana sugar plantation. On the journey she is accompanied โ inconsistently, and never entirely trustworthily โ by spirits, above all Mama Aza, who offer counsel, memory, and a world beyond the one that claims to own her. Structured as a descent, after the Dante her enslaver's daughters are taught, the novel is a story of endurance, grief, and reclamation.
Author: Jesmyn Ward ยท Original publisher: Scribner (New York), 2023
