Books

Mississippi, August 1859. The cook poured the coffee at six-fifteen. By six-thirty she was gone, and the planter’s family was convulsing on the dining room floor.

Mary measured the arsenic the way she measured salt. She has her reasons. She does not intend to explain them to anyone — least of all to Sheriff Booker, the methodical lawman riding...

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...

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...

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...