![]() ![]() 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. 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.Īs 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.īound 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. 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). From the S FWA Grand Master, a “sexy, disturbing, touching, wildly comic . . . ![]()
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