Jeanne slowly succumbs to the ravages of age and syphilis when her lover is unable to escape his mother’s control.
Despite her magic, Mer suffers as a slave on a sugar plantation until Ezili plants the seeds of uprising in her mind. Bound together by Ezili and “the salt road” of their sweat, blood, and tears, the three women struggle against a hostile world, unaware of the goddess’s presence in their lives. As Ezili explores her newfound powers, she travels across time and space to inhabit the midwife’s body, as well as those of Jeanne-a mixed-race dancer and the mistress of Charles Baudelaire living in 1880s Paris-and Meritet, an enslaved Greek-Nubian prostitute in ancient Alexandria. Led by a lesbian healer and midwife named Mer, the women’s lamentations inadvertently release the dead infant’s “unused vitality” to draw Ezili-the Afro-Caribbean goddess of sexual desire and love-into the physical world. In 1804, shortly before the Caribbean island of Saint Domingue is renamed Haiti, a group of women gather to bury a stillborn baby.
tour de force” that blends fantasy, women’s history, and slavery (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). Description: From the SFWA Grand Master, a“sexy, disturbing, touching, wildly comic.
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