The Kongo, 1699. She is fifteen, and her mind will not sit still.
Beatriz was supposed to be a healer. Her mother’s lineage. Her aunt’s teaching. The nganga schools her family sent her to when her gifts first showed. She failed at all of it — not for lack of effort but because her mind refused to conform.
Then a saint began speaking to her.
He...

It's 1980. And there's a church steeple at the bottom of Lake Lanier.

Sixteen-year-old Keisha Montgomery sees it her first night at the lake house — straight lines where straight lines shouldn't be, sixty yards from the dock, twenty feet down. Her parents say it's a summer house. Her father, a civil rights attorney, says he's here for work.

Then...

When Anna Carr died in childbirth in 1900, her family took in three of her four children — but refused the darkest one, Ira. What they couldn't erase was Anna's face, which Ira carried forward through generations shaped by colorism: to her light-skinned daughter Aline, to Aline's son Terrill, and finally to Terrill's daughter Adjoa, who returns...