Daughter of the Merciful Deep
Available in:
- eBook
- Audiobook
- Book info
- Sample
- Media
- Author updates
- Lists
Synopsis
A woman journeys into a submerged world of gods and myth to save her home in this powerful historical fantasy that shines a light on the drowned Black towns of the American South.
“Our home began, as all things do, with a wish.”
Jane Edwards hasn’t spoken since she was eleven years old, when armed riders expelled her family from their hometown along with every other Black resident. Now, twelve years later, she’s found a haven in the all-Black town of Awenasa. But the construction of a dam promises to wash her home under the waters of the new lake.
Jane will do anything to save the community that sheltered her. So, when a man with uncanny abilities arrives in town asking strange questions, she wonders if he's might be the key. But as the stranger hints at gods and ancestral magic, Jane is captivated by a bigger mystery. She knows this man. Only the last time she saw him, he was dead. His body laid to rest in a rushing river.
Who is the stranger and what is he really doing in Awenasa? To find those answers, Jane will journey into a sunken world, a land of capricious gods and unsung myths, of salvation and dreams made real. But the flood waters are rising. To gain the miracle she desires, Jane will have to find her voice again and finally face the trauma of the past.
For more from Leslye Penelope, check out The Monsters We Defy.
Release date: June 4, 2024
Publisher: Orbit
Print pages: 400
* BingeBooks earns revenue from qualifying purchases as an Amazon Associate as well as from other retail partners.
Reader buzz
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
Author updates
Close
Daughter of the Merciful Deep
Leslye Penelope
If you do not let your neighbor have nine, you shall not have ten.
This wasn’t the first time Daniel Braithwaite had found me going through someone’s trash. And to be honest, we both knew it wouldn’t be the last. I heard him coming, though, whistling that same old nameless tune that sometimes echoed in my dreams. Didn’t pay him no mind as he strolled down the alley, calm as you please, and leaned his long self against the side of Kizzie Campbell’s house—freshly painted last month by his own hands.
“Need some help?”
His voice had a smile in it, the way it almost always did, no hint of anger or bitterness or hurt. But it took me a moment to arrange my face before straightening and turning toward him, making sure I wasn’t showing any evidence of turbulence. Nothing but calm seas here, with maybe a tinge of mild annoyance as I raised a brow and pulled my hands out of the trash.
“No, thank you.”
“Hmm.” Then he had the nerve to pull a folded sheaf of papers out of his back pocket, unfold it, and commence to scanning the contents like it was the most natural thing in the world. The masthead read The Awenasa Tattler; it was a typewritten four-page newssheet that was mimeographed and distributed around town by some anonymous author. The little rag had set everybody’s tongue to wagging when it started showing up a few weeks ago.
“Today’s issue had the fellas down at the barbershop’s gums beating, that’s for sure,” he said, grinning, dimples popping. “Was that what you was going for?”
“Like I done told you a thousand times, I don’t write that thing.” My teeth clenched, and I glared at him.
Daniel shrugged. “Sounded to me like you practically announced to the whole town that Mrs. Jefferson’s husband is carrying on with Ruby Mae.”
“Whole town knows about that anyway. And whoever wrote it,” I said, staring at him pointedly, “didn’t say anything of the kind. Just said that Mrs. Jefferson has known disappointments in her time. Could have been talking about losing Richie in the Great War, for all we know. It was just a nice message wishing her a happy birthday. Everybody knows her no-good husband won’t do nothing for her. Now, leave me alone.” I shooed at him, but he only sidled up closer.
“What you looking for, anyway?” He peered over my shoulder and into the can, giving me a whiff of that same cologne he’d been wearing since he was sixteen. The one that smelled like cedar and apples. I knew he’d been working this morning, but he still had the nerve to smell sweet.
I elbowed him in the ribs. “None of your beeswax, that’s what. Don’t you have something better to do?”
“If Miz Kizzie wanted to submit her short stories to those New York literary journals, she’d do it on her own,” he said.
I gave him a scathing look. We both knew that wasn’t true. She’d had one published in The Crisis last fall; it had turned her into a minor local celebrity. Of course, she never admitted to anyone that she hadn’t even submitted the piece, and I wondered how she thought they’d gotten it.
Daddy always preached about not hiding your light under a bushel, and while Daniel might have thought it wrong to take someone’s hard work out of the trash and get it published in a highly respected nationwide literary journal, I didn’t feel sorry about it one bit. Sometimes folks can’t get out of their own way and need a little help.
At my stern expression, Daniel held up his hands, chuckling, then folded the newsletter and tucked it in his back pocket. I turned back to the trash and spotted a little bit of orange fuzz poking out from behind some crumpled handwritten pages where the ink was too smudged to make out. I made a mental note to check again next week to see if there was anything worth reading in the discarded drafts but for now pulled out what looked at first like a bundle of rags and held it up, triumphant.
Daniel’s brows rose in question.
“If you must know, I heard little Nellie Hillgrass kicking up one heck of a fuss this morning as I was passing by the boardinghouse. Couldn’t find her little doll and made sure everybody knew. Felt bad for her, and I know Miss Kizzie’s been watching her while her mama is working, so I figured it might have been thrown out accidentally. Miss Helen did say that it was an old doll, one she’d had as a child.”
The thing in my hand was older than old—it was positively ancient, its fabric frayed and thin. It was hardly even recognizable as a doll, but the orange yarn I’d glimpsed could be viewed from a certain light as a tuft of hair. And the yellow fabric with tiny blotches was maybe a face. I brushed off some lint and dust clinging to the poor, dilapidated little thing.
A warm stream of nostalgia flowed over me. When I was Nellie’s age, I’d had a beloved doll too. She’d had a name… but I couldn’t bring it to mind. And the toy’s fate was lost to the ravages of time; I shook off the urge to remember—it didn’t matter anyway, I was grown now.
“You taking that over to the boardinghouse?” Daniel asked just as the clock on top of City Hall tolled the hour.
“Need to head to the feed store first. I’ll do it on the way home.” I placed the small cloth figure in my dress pocket and set the lid back on the trash can. “Where are you supposed to be?”
He jerked his thumb down the street. “Back to the barbershop. Line should be shorter now, place was packed like a sardine can this morning. I’ll walk with you.”
We strolled off in a silence that a week earlier I would have called companionable. This week, I didn’t have a word for it. There’s a feeling a body can get like it’s being split in half. One part giddy with anticipation and the other part stiff with discomfort. The half that was closest to him as we made our way down the street couldn’t decide which one it wanted to be, and so it kept switching, leaving me off-balance.
He didn’t show any evidence of being the least bit off-kilter, ambling along, hands in his pockets, whistling that damned tune I couldn’t pry from my head. It was like nothing had happened at all on that log by the riverside with the high trill of warblers harmonizing overhead.
So I squared my shoulders and tried to force the two halves of me into one cohesive part, but it was futile. By the time we reached Freedom Street, the tug-of-war going on within me had started to give me a headache. There was a heavy pressure and a wheezy hum like the buzzing of locusts. But I quickly realized that wasn’t my head at all.
Activity on the town’s main street, usually bustling at this time of day, had drawn to a standstill. Daniel and I stepped up to the corner as a swarm of shiny black Fords rounded the large traffic circle where, in the center of a grassy park, Big Beulah reigned, overlooking our town. Noisy diesel motors bombinated as metal and chrome glinted in the summer sun.
The vehicles pulled up in a line and parked right there in the center of the street. Twelve identical cars like a funeral procession. Then twelve white men exited, slamming their doors in unison, startled like caught fish, turning their heads, gaping at everything they saw. They were as out of place as fish standing on the street as well. Not sure this street had ever seen so many white folks on it at the same time.
One by one, the interlopers strode toward the center of their line, the middle car double-parked right in front of the Sugar Plum Fairy Sweets Shoppe. They bent their fedora-covered heads together. Daniel and I crossed the street. In front of Liddel Lee’s barbershop, the old-timers who gathered there on the stoop for board games and old-man gossip watched the newcomers with suspicion.
“Tell you what, they take one step on my property and they’ll become close personal friends with my Winchester,” Linus Cotter was saying.
Augustus Henley snorted and slammed down a domino, making the little wooden table rattle; Linus did a double take. “Why, you no-good… You think you slicker than a nickel, but I got your penny change,” he grumbled. “How you doin’ this afternoon, Janie, Daniel?”
“Afternoon, Mr. Linus, Mr. Gus,” Daniel said before giving me a brief salute and disappearing inside the shop. I waved to the men and pressed the thumb of my open hand against my chest in a hand motion that meant “I’m fine.” The old men grunted and refocused on their game.
Up ahead, Mabel Statler and Emmaline Waldorf walked down the sidewalk, bickering as usual. I slid against the wall to the side of the big picture window, hoping that between the cluster of white men still in the street and the rising voices from the dominoes game, neither woman would notice me.
Unfortunately, luck wasn’t on my side.
“Jane Edwards, we missed you at the auxiliary meeting today.” Miss Mabel’s round face was smiling sweetly, hiding the venom within. “Emmaline said you were probably at work, but I thought I remembered this was one of your days off.” Towering over her was her housemate, Miss Emmaline, whose pinched expression masked a core of honey.
I rubbed my fist in a circle against my chest, the motion for “I’m sorry,” hoping to convey my profound regret at not being able to attend a meeting I had no intention of ever being at.
“The Founding Day committee could use you as its chairwoman, sweetheart,” Miss Emmaline said, her rich Jamaican accent making the words sound like a song. “You’re such a good organizer. Just like your dear mother, may she rest in peace. What you did for Sonia Cracknell’s homegoing, Jane…” She pressed a fist to her lips and shook her head, struck by emotion.
My throat thickened. Our next-door neighbor, Mama Sonia, had been a pillar of life in Awenasa. Her influence weighed almost as heavily as that of Old George, the town’s founder. She had lived for ninety-nine years, and was crotchety as a flea-bitten cat for every one of them. But I sure missed her. Since she had no living kin, I’d taken on the task of planning her funeral. And now nobody would let me forget it.
“Emmaline, I know you’re not tearing up again,” Mabel said, annoyed. “That woman is in the Upper Room with our Lord and Savior, and now at least I can plant my roses in peace without having to hear Mama Sonia’s mouth about how I’m not doing it right.”
The taller woman put her hands on her hips. “I know you’re not speaking ill of the dead, Mabel Pauline. You should be ashamed of yourself.”
“I’m not saying nothing but the God’s own truth. Tell me that woman wasn’t always in everybody’s business…”
I made a motion like I was in a rush and managed to slip away while they went on snapping at each other. Apparently, those two had been squabbling since before I was born, yet they’d lived together for just as long.
By the time I was in front of the feed store, the slams of car doors, one after another, punctuated my steps. The engines of those shiny black Fords rumbled to life, and they took off again, this time dispersing, with some veering down side streets, others executing illegal U-turns and driving back the way they came.
I paused at the threshold of the shop as the drone of motors began to fade. This morning, Daddy had asked me to pick up some chicken feed for Mercy, Patience, and Faith, but the store didn’t close until five. Should be plenty of time to do a little more snooping and maybe get a closer look at one of those Fords.
Do not follow a person who is running away.
This past spring, one of the Avery twins, who both worked out on the Rhodes farm, said he saw a couple of white men trespassing on the hill overlooking the river, carrying some kind of telescope. But didn’t nobody pay him no mind, because those boys like to spin tall tales, especially once they get some liquor in them. Everybody had a good laugh at their expense, imagining astronomers traipsing around Awenasa in the middle of the day, trying to see the stars in a bright blue sky. It wasn’t until Purcell Falkner and Johnnie Bayliss told similar stories about encountering men with strange equipment on their land that anyone took notice.
Johnnie Bayliss, being a friendly kind of fellow and light enough to pass, was the one who mustered up the gumption to go up to them and ask what the hell they were doing on his property. Those men said they were from the Army Corps of Engineers and they were doing a survey for the State Authority. Suddenly it wasn’t so funny.
Now, I’m no lawyer, but I suspect that if a government employee in a government-issued vehicle leaves the door of said vehicle unlocked, well then, he must not care too much about keeping what’s inside secret, right? The vehicle in question was parked in front of Noble and Big Aggie Hodge’s little blue house. The white man who had gotten out of it was at that moment sitting in their parlor with a cup of tea—the good china—balanced on his knee, scribbling in a brand-new notebook with a number two pencil.
Identical composition notebooks with crisp, blank pages along with a fresh box of sharpened pencils had been neatly placed in an Authority-issued briefcase. Also inside, a folder labeled BACKGROUND with a typewritten information sheet listing the barest of details on the town:
Awenasa: Founded in 1885 by George Ezekiel Braithwaite, who remains the majority landowner.
Located along the south side of the Noxahatchie River, 72 miles from the state capital. Accessible via Route 389.
Population: 617 according to the 1930 census. Inhabitants 98% Negro.
That population number should really have been 618, since it didn’t include Grace. Well, 619 if you counted the baby too. And the 2 percent of whites all belonged to one family, the Denhams, and their various kinfolk.
’Course, the information sheet didn’t say anything about how Old George had bought forty acres from his father and former master ten years after the end of the Civil War. How he’d spent those ten years working on the same plantation where he’d been born, earning ten dollars a month, hoarding every penny. Eventually, forty acres became eighty became one hundred sixty as he purchased land from debt-ridden and destitute whites and former slave owners who no longer had the ability to farm it, now that they had to pay for labor.
By the time he’d turned those forty acres into four hundred, he was renting plots to other Negroes and underwriting mortgages to help them build their wealth. He invested in businesses so local farmers could earn money the six months a year after the crops came in. So that instead of traveling all the way to Addison City to do their shopping, folks would have shops close to home that would serve Colored people with respect.
Old George helped build just about every building on Freedom Street with his own hands. His mill provided the lumber, his bank the financing. Awenasa had a post office. Two grocery stores. Three barbershops. A restaurant that served hot meals every day but Sunday. Not to mention the turpentine still, the cottonseed oil mill, and the Awenasa Academic and Industrial Institute, the crowning jewel of our community, sitting there on the top of the hill. Not bad for an all-Negro town. But the Authority’s information sheet didn’t mention any of that.
“Jane Edwards, what are you doing in that man’s car? Get on out of there before he comes back.”
I startled at the gruff, clipped voice behind me. It wasn’t often that someone could sneak up on me while I was sneaking. I replaced everything inside the briefcase, shut the door quietly, and turned to face Miss Althea. She was a short, elderly brown-skinned woman with a cap of wiry white kinks. Her acid tongue was legendary. I’d been on the receiving end of one of her dressing-downs before and didn’t relish it. Now her eyes were narrowed on me. I tried to look as contrite as possible.
“You find out anything good?” she asked, eyes twinkling.
I couldn’t wipe the shock from my expression fast enough, and she burst into a harsh, braying laughter. I itched to grab the pencil and pad from my pocket and answer her, but like so many of the elders, Miss Althea couldn’t read. So I just shook my head. I expected her to start laying into me for snooping, but instead she leaned in closer, smelling of those peculiar cigars she liked to smoke on her porch at night. The scent was potent and woodsy but not unpleasant.
“Only takes a candle to shine a light in the darkness, Jane.”
I froze at her strange words.
“One little flame scares those shadows away, you hear me?”
“Y-yes, ma’am,” I whispered, almost too soft to hear, once again feeling off-balance.
She seemed satisfied at my attempt at a response and turned back to look at the Hodge house. How long would they be entertaining their visitor? How long would it be the Hodge house? If the Authority got their way, not much longer at all.
“What’s done in the dark will come to light sooner or later,” she said. “Those shadows can’t win forever.”
I blinked. Was she talking about the Authority? She must be, but it didn’t make sense to me. She wasn’t as old as Mama Sonia or Old George, but it was possible her mind was starting to go. I nodded, though, pretending to understand—and she finally moved away, leaning on her gnarled wooden cane. Its thump against the concrete was a drumbeat marking her steps.
Having not found anything particularly interesting or useful today, I figured I would drop off Nellie Hillgrass’s doll since I was close to the boardinghouse where she and her mother stayed. As I made my way over there, I passed another black Ford parked in front of the Baynes residence. However, Justus Baynes hadn’t greeted his unwelcome visitor with tea and good china. He was sitting on his front porch, shotgun draped across his lap and pointed to the side.
The white man stood on the sidewalk, wisely not on Justus’s property, but that wisdom went only so far, because he appeared to be pleading his case, demanding entry, gesticulating with his arms. If he was waiting for Mr. Baynes to change his mind, he’d be standing there all damn day.
I chuckled to myself as I approached the two-story green clapboard home out of which Ruby Mae Rivington ran her boardinghouse. I knocked on the door and was greeted by Awenasa’s newest resident—unless you counted Grace, whom I didn’t, though that was arguable. Helen Hillgrass had come to town four months ago, newly widowed and with shadows in her eyes that spoke of memories best forgotten. In that respect, she wasn’t so different from most other folks around here, myself included.
Once there had been a sign on the road into town, painted by Old George himself, reading: WELCOME TO AWENASA. NEVER BACKWARDS, EVER FORWARDS. The town motto was accentuated with an orange-gold starburst meant to represent the globe of a flowering sycamore. But the sign kept getting splashed with white paint and, finally, tar—turns out everyone wasn’t so happy about a town full of Negroes doing well. Old George must have gotten tired of repainting the thing, and it was eventually taken down. I heard him say afterward, “We don’t need no sign anyway. Folks here know where they’re at.”
Most newcomers arrived with haunting stories: sometimes it was riders in the night with shotguns, or property burned, livestock poisoned, crops salted, loved ones dragged away… Miss Helen was no different. Looking forward meant it wasn’t necessary to delve into the particulars of the horrors they’d endured in order to welcome someone home. Though the grapevine whispered of a husband lost to violence in the night perpetrated by men who would never pay for their crime.
I hoped the sorrow in her dark brown eyes would lift soon. When she answered the door, I smiled and pulled the little ragged bundle of cloth from my pocket. Miss Helen’s lips parted. I’m pretty tall for a woman and she towered a head taller than me, so I looked up into grateful eyes.
“Where did you find that?” she said, stepping aside to let me in. “Oh, Nellie is going to be sooo happy. Thank you, Jane.”
I shook my head to indicate it wasn’t a big deal. After looking around the empty front parlor, I pointed to the doll and then down, asking if Nellie was here. Of course, Miss Helen hadn’t been in town long enough to understand, so I fished for my pad and pencil.
“Oh, that’s right, you don’t…” She caught herself before she could say talk, but I didn’t take offense. What would be the point? She was right. “Nellie’s out back. Come on.”
We passed through the hall and into the kitchen, where preparations for dinner were in full swing. Ruby Mae had hired Miss Helen to cook for her boarders since she’d had a falling-out with her last cook—Mrs. Jefferson. But it was just as well whoever wrote the Tattler didn’t print that detail.
Out back, Nellie was employed in a complicated construction project involving twigs and pebbles and an impressively built tower. She stood when her mother stepped out onto the back porch.
“Nellie, look what Miss Jane found!” Helen held the doll up in the air, and the little girl squealed in delight. She was four years old with freckled tawny skin and thick flaming-red hair. Her mother’s complexion was a pale yellow and her dark hair didn’t hold so much as a hint of copper, so the girl must have inherited her coloring from her late father.
“Henrietta!” the child yelled, and I gathered that was the name of the unfortunate doll. Nellie raced up the steps to grab it from her mother’s hands.
“What do we say?”
“Thank you, Miss Jane,” the child lisped, and clutched the rags to her chest. I knelt to her level and whispered, “You’re welcome.” Then Nellie raced away, beaming.
“Not sure how to thank you,” Helen said. “I can’t imagine where that old thing could have been.”
I didn’t bother trying to communicate where I’d found the doll. Sometimes ignorance was bliss. The thing would definitely not stand up to a washing, and besides, there hadn’t been anything nasty in Miss Kizzie’s trash can anyway, it was mostly paper.
“Everyone here has been so kind.” Miss Helen swallowed, her eyes going glassy. “Good to know there’s still kindness in the world.” She stared at her daughter playing innocently in the grass.
I left a few minutes later, having every intention of heading to the feed store, I swear. Instead of walking back through the house, I figured I’d just go around the side, and that was when I found the home’s owner, Ruby Mae, on the porch with a man I’d never seen before.
I would have thought he was one of the Authority men except for two things—the only car parked out front was Ruby Mae’s bright red Hudson, and the man in the brown suit was Negro. Tall and broad shouldered, skin as dark as mine—like freshly tilled soil—he had a confident, determined walk as he jogged down the steps and walked away. Younger than any of the white men I’d seen that day but carrying a briefcase just like theirs.
Ruby stood with one arm wrapped around the porch post, waving at him with a big smile illuminating her face. Called out for him to “Come back anytime!” Whoever he was, she had her sights set on him, that was obvious, but something in the sharklike determination arrowing her gaze made it clear she hadn’t snared him yet. And the fact that he didn’t look back at her, not even once, like just about every other able-bodied man in town would have, meant he might not be in danger of falling for her charms. I snickered at the expression on her face and couldn’t stop myself from following after him.
The man walked down Washington Avenue and turned onto Freedom Street. His stride became more purposeful, and his pace quickened until I had to jog to keep up with him. I stayed on the other side of the road, half a block back, but he never turned around. He passed the Sunrise Bakery without even pausing to take a sniff of Miss Della’s mouthwatering treats. Walked by the Fashion Clotherie without doing a double take at the mannequin sitting out in the picture window in nothing but its unmentionables for the world to see as Miss Tamar dressed it.
When he turned onto Church Street, I nearly stumbled. Only thing down that way besides the church was the river. Seeing as it was Monday and there were no meetings scheduled, which would have had Daddy opening the church, that meant the man with the briefcase must be headed over to the banks of the Noxahatchie.
I veered down an alley and took off running for the cemetery, where I could cut through the path and take a shortcut to the river. By the time I reached the big pawpaw tree, I was huffing and puffing and sweating like a pregnant hog, but I’d beat him there.
Gravel crunched under his feet as he got closer, still walking fast, like he was going to work or was late for an important meeting, not like he was strolling to the river. The dense cluster of sweetspire bushes just off the path concealed me. I’d spent a lot of time there when we first moved to Awenasa, listening to the other kids playing in the river, knowing I’d never join them.
As the footsteps drew closer, I crouched, balanced on the balls of my feet. The man strode by, and through the leafy branches I caught a glimpse of his face.
And fell right down onto my behind.
It took me three tries to get back on my feet. Of course, my dress and the palms of my hands were covered in grit by then. I burst from the bushes, all thoughts of sneaking gone because what I thought I saw was impossible.
The entire thing had taken maybe ten seconds. Falling, trying to stand, finally succeeding. This path went only one way and dead-ended at the water’s edge. There was nowhere else to go. But as I stepped onto the gravel, I was alone. The man with the briefcase had disappeared.
I started to think maybe he hadn’t ever really been there at all. Because that brief peek I got of his face? The thing that scared me half to death and literally knocked me off my feet?
He’d worn the face of a dead man.
You will have the same question so many have asked before you—when did it all begin? However, not even Mama Yoja remembers how New Ilé first came to be. Sometimes she’ll say the island started as a speck of sand caught under the fingernail of the One Who Came Before, that rubbed and rubbed itself into a pearl large enough to be island sized. But Papa Loku will always break in and remind us that the One Who Came Before doesn’t have fingers, much less fingernails. Loku is of the opinion that our home began, as all things do, with a wish.
You see, within the mighty nothingness of the void in which it had always existed, the One Who Came Before had an awakening. A desire. It wished for an end to sameness. Something different from the eternal static nature of itself. It wished for Not Itself.
And ché was born.
Oh, you know ché, child, even if you do not know its name. Even if you call it something else, as so many do. Ché is spirit. The essence of life that runs through all things. Divine energy. The infinite possibility of otherness. Change.
Ché gave the rest of the wishes their power.
Soon, light was created. Then darkness. Then the spaces in between them all—air. Then heat. Cold. Motion. Vibration. All with their own ché running through them. And these Not Itselves, these creations, also had the ability to create. They made dawn and dusk. Sun and moon. Clouds and stars. Water and land.
Of course, water is the best of them all, if you ask me. It moves constantly, can never be still, can never be the same. With a single drop of water, you can create an entire world. The drop is the ocean; the stream is the river. Where does one begin and the other end? Water is harmony and chaos all rolled up together, one becoming all becoming one again. It is the ultimate atonement of existence. Always changing. Itself, but not itself. It is all that the One Who Came Before hoped for in its first wish.
The ché of this creation is so powerful, so fluid, so unable to be contained that both Mama Yoja and Papa Loku were born from the wish of water.
And so was I.
In a way, that means you were, too, my daughter. So, yes, one of the few things Yoja and Loku can agree on was that the water was first, and as its very nature is not to stay the same, land came fast on its heels—a desire for the water to be Not Itself. At least not all the time. The grit of sand against the shifting flow pressing against it. Forming alliances, connecting in a way the liquid never could.
Mama Yoja will say that this is how other islands were formed, but New Ilé was different. There are times she claims it has always been, that it is as timeless as the One Who Came Before and existed in a place the first creator didn’t notice until after its initial wish. Other times, she’ll say the island was fashioned from the mounds of droppings of the children of Papa Tala—her brother, created from the wish of light. His children are the flying and crawling creatures whom he wished for. They populate the lands he oversees with great care.
I’ve even heard her tell a tale about a great golden light piercing the dark of night, dimming the stars and blinding half of everyone in the world. When they could see again, the island was here. Formed by an unknown hand, created in mystery. Papa Loku, a fan of all things enigmatic, will smile at this, and not contradict a thing.
And if you want to know why this is New Ilé and where is Old Ilé, well, I ask the same thing and the elders just laugh and laugh. “Everything is new to you, my dau
This wasn’t the first time Daniel Braithwaite had found me going through someone’s trash. And to be honest, we both knew it wouldn’t be the last. I heard him coming, though, whistling that same old nameless tune that sometimes echoed in my dreams. Didn’t pay him no mind as he strolled down the alley, calm as you please, and leaned his long self against the side of Kizzie Campbell’s house—freshly painted last month by his own hands.
“Need some help?”
His voice had a smile in it, the way it almost always did, no hint of anger or bitterness or hurt. But it took me a moment to arrange my face before straightening and turning toward him, making sure I wasn’t showing any evidence of turbulence. Nothing but calm seas here, with maybe a tinge of mild annoyance as I raised a brow and pulled my hands out of the trash.
“No, thank you.”
“Hmm.” Then he had the nerve to pull a folded sheaf of papers out of his back pocket, unfold it, and commence to scanning the contents like it was the most natural thing in the world. The masthead read The Awenasa Tattler; it was a typewritten four-page newssheet that was mimeographed and distributed around town by some anonymous author. The little rag had set everybody’s tongue to wagging when it started showing up a few weeks ago.
“Today’s issue had the fellas down at the barbershop’s gums beating, that’s for sure,” he said, grinning, dimples popping. “Was that what you was going for?”
“Like I done told you a thousand times, I don’t write that thing.” My teeth clenched, and I glared at him.
Daniel shrugged. “Sounded to me like you practically announced to the whole town that Mrs. Jefferson’s husband is carrying on with Ruby Mae.”
“Whole town knows about that anyway. And whoever wrote it,” I said, staring at him pointedly, “didn’t say anything of the kind. Just said that Mrs. Jefferson has known disappointments in her time. Could have been talking about losing Richie in the Great War, for all we know. It was just a nice message wishing her a happy birthday. Everybody knows her no-good husband won’t do nothing for her. Now, leave me alone.” I shooed at him, but he only sidled up closer.
“What you looking for, anyway?” He peered over my shoulder and into the can, giving me a whiff of that same cologne he’d been wearing since he was sixteen. The one that smelled like cedar and apples. I knew he’d been working this morning, but he still had the nerve to smell sweet.
I elbowed him in the ribs. “None of your beeswax, that’s what. Don’t you have something better to do?”
“If Miz Kizzie wanted to submit her short stories to those New York literary journals, she’d do it on her own,” he said.
I gave him a scathing look. We both knew that wasn’t true. She’d had one published in The Crisis last fall; it had turned her into a minor local celebrity. Of course, she never admitted to anyone that she hadn’t even submitted the piece, and I wondered how she thought they’d gotten it.
Daddy always preached about not hiding your light under a bushel, and while Daniel might have thought it wrong to take someone’s hard work out of the trash and get it published in a highly respected nationwide literary journal, I didn’t feel sorry about it one bit. Sometimes folks can’t get out of their own way and need a little help.
At my stern expression, Daniel held up his hands, chuckling, then folded the newsletter and tucked it in his back pocket. I turned back to the trash and spotted a little bit of orange fuzz poking out from behind some crumpled handwritten pages where the ink was too smudged to make out. I made a mental note to check again next week to see if there was anything worth reading in the discarded drafts but for now pulled out what looked at first like a bundle of rags and held it up, triumphant.
Daniel’s brows rose in question.
“If you must know, I heard little Nellie Hillgrass kicking up one heck of a fuss this morning as I was passing by the boardinghouse. Couldn’t find her little doll and made sure everybody knew. Felt bad for her, and I know Miss Kizzie’s been watching her while her mama is working, so I figured it might have been thrown out accidentally. Miss Helen did say that it was an old doll, one she’d had as a child.”
The thing in my hand was older than old—it was positively ancient, its fabric frayed and thin. It was hardly even recognizable as a doll, but the orange yarn I’d glimpsed could be viewed from a certain light as a tuft of hair. And the yellow fabric with tiny blotches was maybe a face. I brushed off some lint and dust clinging to the poor, dilapidated little thing.
A warm stream of nostalgia flowed over me. When I was Nellie’s age, I’d had a beloved doll too. She’d had a name… but I couldn’t bring it to mind. And the toy’s fate was lost to the ravages of time; I shook off the urge to remember—it didn’t matter anyway, I was grown now.
“You taking that over to the boardinghouse?” Daniel asked just as the clock on top of City Hall tolled the hour.
“Need to head to the feed store first. I’ll do it on the way home.” I placed the small cloth figure in my dress pocket and set the lid back on the trash can. “Where are you supposed to be?”
He jerked his thumb down the street. “Back to the barbershop. Line should be shorter now, place was packed like a sardine can this morning. I’ll walk with you.”
We strolled off in a silence that a week earlier I would have called companionable. This week, I didn’t have a word for it. There’s a feeling a body can get like it’s being split in half. One part giddy with anticipation and the other part stiff with discomfort. The half that was closest to him as we made our way down the street couldn’t decide which one it wanted to be, and so it kept switching, leaving me off-balance.
He didn’t show any evidence of being the least bit off-kilter, ambling along, hands in his pockets, whistling that damned tune I couldn’t pry from my head. It was like nothing had happened at all on that log by the riverside with the high trill of warblers harmonizing overhead.
So I squared my shoulders and tried to force the two halves of me into one cohesive part, but it was futile. By the time we reached Freedom Street, the tug-of-war going on within me had started to give me a headache. There was a heavy pressure and a wheezy hum like the buzzing of locusts. But I quickly realized that wasn’t my head at all.
Activity on the town’s main street, usually bustling at this time of day, had drawn to a standstill. Daniel and I stepped up to the corner as a swarm of shiny black Fords rounded the large traffic circle where, in the center of a grassy park, Big Beulah reigned, overlooking our town. Noisy diesel motors bombinated as metal and chrome glinted in the summer sun.
The vehicles pulled up in a line and parked right there in the center of the street. Twelve identical cars like a funeral procession. Then twelve white men exited, slamming their doors in unison, startled like caught fish, turning their heads, gaping at everything they saw. They were as out of place as fish standing on the street as well. Not sure this street had ever seen so many white folks on it at the same time.
One by one, the interlopers strode toward the center of their line, the middle car double-parked right in front of the Sugar Plum Fairy Sweets Shoppe. They bent their fedora-covered heads together. Daniel and I crossed the street. In front of Liddel Lee’s barbershop, the old-timers who gathered there on the stoop for board games and old-man gossip watched the newcomers with suspicion.
“Tell you what, they take one step on my property and they’ll become close personal friends with my Winchester,” Linus Cotter was saying.
Augustus Henley snorted and slammed down a domino, making the little wooden table rattle; Linus did a double take. “Why, you no-good… You think you slicker than a nickel, but I got your penny change,” he grumbled. “How you doin’ this afternoon, Janie, Daniel?”
“Afternoon, Mr. Linus, Mr. Gus,” Daniel said before giving me a brief salute and disappearing inside the shop. I waved to the men and pressed the thumb of my open hand against my chest in a hand motion that meant “I’m fine.” The old men grunted and refocused on their game.
Up ahead, Mabel Statler and Emmaline Waldorf walked down the sidewalk, bickering as usual. I slid against the wall to the side of the big picture window, hoping that between the cluster of white men still in the street and the rising voices from the dominoes game, neither woman would notice me.
Unfortunately, luck wasn’t on my side.
“Jane Edwards, we missed you at the auxiliary meeting today.” Miss Mabel’s round face was smiling sweetly, hiding the venom within. “Emmaline said you were probably at work, but I thought I remembered this was one of your days off.” Towering over her was her housemate, Miss Emmaline, whose pinched expression masked a core of honey.
I rubbed my fist in a circle against my chest, the motion for “I’m sorry,” hoping to convey my profound regret at not being able to attend a meeting I had no intention of ever being at.
“The Founding Day committee could use you as its chairwoman, sweetheart,” Miss Emmaline said, her rich Jamaican accent making the words sound like a song. “You’re such a good organizer. Just like your dear mother, may she rest in peace. What you did for Sonia Cracknell’s homegoing, Jane…” She pressed a fist to her lips and shook her head, struck by emotion.
My throat thickened. Our next-door neighbor, Mama Sonia, had been a pillar of life in Awenasa. Her influence weighed almost as heavily as that of Old George, the town’s founder. She had lived for ninety-nine years, and was crotchety as a flea-bitten cat for every one of them. But I sure missed her. Since she had no living kin, I’d taken on the task of planning her funeral. And now nobody would let me forget it.
“Emmaline, I know you’re not tearing up again,” Mabel said, annoyed. “That woman is in the Upper Room with our Lord and Savior, and now at least I can plant my roses in peace without having to hear Mama Sonia’s mouth about how I’m not doing it right.”
The taller woman put her hands on her hips. “I know you’re not speaking ill of the dead, Mabel Pauline. You should be ashamed of yourself.”
“I’m not saying nothing but the God’s own truth. Tell me that woman wasn’t always in everybody’s business…”
I made a motion like I was in a rush and managed to slip away while they went on snapping at each other. Apparently, those two had been squabbling since before I was born, yet they’d lived together for just as long.
By the time I was in front of the feed store, the slams of car doors, one after another, punctuated my steps. The engines of those shiny black Fords rumbled to life, and they took off again, this time dispersing, with some veering down side streets, others executing illegal U-turns and driving back the way they came.
I paused at the threshold of the shop as the drone of motors began to fade. This morning, Daddy had asked me to pick up some chicken feed for Mercy, Patience, and Faith, but the store didn’t close until five. Should be plenty of time to do a little more snooping and maybe get a closer look at one of those Fords.
Do not follow a person who is running away.
This past spring, one of the Avery twins, who both worked out on the Rhodes farm, said he saw a couple of white men trespassing on the hill overlooking the river, carrying some kind of telescope. But didn’t nobody pay him no mind, because those boys like to spin tall tales, especially once they get some liquor in them. Everybody had a good laugh at their expense, imagining astronomers traipsing around Awenasa in the middle of the day, trying to see the stars in a bright blue sky. It wasn’t until Purcell Falkner and Johnnie Bayliss told similar stories about encountering men with strange equipment on their land that anyone took notice.
Johnnie Bayliss, being a friendly kind of fellow and light enough to pass, was the one who mustered up the gumption to go up to them and ask what the hell they were doing on his property. Those men said they were from the Army Corps of Engineers and they were doing a survey for the State Authority. Suddenly it wasn’t so funny.
Now, I’m no lawyer, but I suspect that if a government employee in a government-issued vehicle leaves the door of said vehicle unlocked, well then, he must not care too much about keeping what’s inside secret, right? The vehicle in question was parked in front of Noble and Big Aggie Hodge’s little blue house. The white man who had gotten out of it was at that moment sitting in their parlor with a cup of tea—the good china—balanced on his knee, scribbling in a brand-new notebook with a number two pencil.
Identical composition notebooks with crisp, blank pages along with a fresh box of sharpened pencils had been neatly placed in an Authority-issued briefcase. Also inside, a folder labeled BACKGROUND with a typewritten information sheet listing the barest of details on the town:
Awenasa: Founded in 1885 by George Ezekiel Braithwaite, who remains the majority landowner.
Located along the south side of the Noxahatchie River, 72 miles from the state capital. Accessible via Route 389.
Population: 617 according to the 1930 census. Inhabitants 98% Negro.
That population number should really have been 618, since it didn’t include Grace. Well, 619 if you counted the baby too. And the 2 percent of whites all belonged to one family, the Denhams, and their various kinfolk.
’Course, the information sheet didn’t say anything about how Old George had bought forty acres from his father and former master ten years after the end of the Civil War. How he’d spent those ten years working on the same plantation where he’d been born, earning ten dollars a month, hoarding every penny. Eventually, forty acres became eighty became one hundred sixty as he purchased land from debt-ridden and destitute whites and former slave owners who no longer had the ability to farm it, now that they had to pay for labor.
By the time he’d turned those forty acres into four hundred, he was renting plots to other Negroes and underwriting mortgages to help them build their wealth. He invested in businesses so local farmers could earn money the six months a year after the crops came in. So that instead of traveling all the way to Addison City to do their shopping, folks would have shops close to home that would serve Colored people with respect.
Old George helped build just about every building on Freedom Street with his own hands. His mill provided the lumber, his bank the financing. Awenasa had a post office. Two grocery stores. Three barbershops. A restaurant that served hot meals every day but Sunday. Not to mention the turpentine still, the cottonseed oil mill, and the Awenasa Academic and Industrial Institute, the crowning jewel of our community, sitting there on the top of the hill. Not bad for an all-Negro town. But the Authority’s information sheet didn’t mention any of that.
“Jane Edwards, what are you doing in that man’s car? Get on out of there before he comes back.”
I startled at the gruff, clipped voice behind me. It wasn’t often that someone could sneak up on me while I was sneaking. I replaced everything inside the briefcase, shut the door quietly, and turned to face Miss Althea. She was a short, elderly brown-skinned woman with a cap of wiry white kinks. Her acid tongue was legendary. I’d been on the receiving end of one of her dressing-downs before and didn’t relish it. Now her eyes were narrowed on me. I tried to look as contrite as possible.
“You find out anything good?” she asked, eyes twinkling.
I couldn’t wipe the shock from my expression fast enough, and she burst into a harsh, braying laughter. I itched to grab the pencil and pad from my pocket and answer her, but like so many of the elders, Miss Althea couldn’t read. So I just shook my head. I expected her to start laying into me for snooping, but instead she leaned in closer, smelling of those peculiar cigars she liked to smoke on her porch at night. The scent was potent and woodsy but not unpleasant.
“Only takes a candle to shine a light in the darkness, Jane.”
I froze at her strange words.
“One little flame scares those shadows away, you hear me?”
“Y-yes, ma’am,” I whispered, almost too soft to hear, once again feeling off-balance.
She seemed satisfied at my attempt at a response and turned back to look at the Hodge house. How long would they be entertaining their visitor? How long would it be the Hodge house? If the Authority got their way, not much longer at all.
“What’s done in the dark will come to light sooner or later,” she said. “Those shadows can’t win forever.”
I blinked. Was she talking about the Authority? She must be, but it didn’t make sense to me. She wasn’t as old as Mama Sonia or Old George, but it was possible her mind was starting to go. I nodded, though, pretending to understand—and she finally moved away, leaning on her gnarled wooden cane. Its thump against the concrete was a drumbeat marking her steps.
Having not found anything particularly interesting or useful today, I figured I would drop off Nellie Hillgrass’s doll since I was close to the boardinghouse where she and her mother stayed. As I made my way over there, I passed another black Ford parked in front of the Baynes residence. However, Justus Baynes hadn’t greeted his unwelcome visitor with tea and good china. He was sitting on his front porch, shotgun draped across his lap and pointed to the side.
The white man stood on the sidewalk, wisely not on Justus’s property, but that wisdom went only so far, because he appeared to be pleading his case, demanding entry, gesticulating with his arms. If he was waiting for Mr. Baynes to change his mind, he’d be standing there all damn day.
I chuckled to myself as I approached the two-story green clapboard home out of which Ruby Mae Rivington ran her boardinghouse. I knocked on the door and was greeted by Awenasa’s newest resident—unless you counted Grace, whom I didn’t, though that was arguable. Helen Hillgrass had come to town four months ago, newly widowed and with shadows in her eyes that spoke of memories best forgotten. In that respect, she wasn’t so different from most other folks around here, myself included.
Once there had been a sign on the road into town, painted by Old George himself, reading: WELCOME TO AWENASA. NEVER BACKWARDS, EVER FORWARDS. The town motto was accentuated with an orange-gold starburst meant to represent the globe of a flowering sycamore. But the sign kept getting splashed with white paint and, finally, tar—turns out everyone wasn’t so happy about a town full of Negroes doing well. Old George must have gotten tired of repainting the thing, and it was eventually taken down. I heard him say afterward, “We don’t need no sign anyway. Folks here know where they’re at.”
Most newcomers arrived with haunting stories: sometimes it was riders in the night with shotguns, or property burned, livestock poisoned, crops salted, loved ones dragged away… Miss Helen was no different. Looking forward meant it wasn’t necessary to delve into the particulars of the horrors they’d endured in order to welcome someone home. Though the grapevine whispered of a husband lost to violence in the night perpetrated by men who would never pay for their crime.
I hoped the sorrow in her dark brown eyes would lift soon. When she answered the door, I smiled and pulled the little ragged bundle of cloth from my pocket. Miss Helen’s lips parted. I’m pretty tall for a woman and she towered a head taller than me, so I looked up into grateful eyes.
“Where did you find that?” she said, stepping aside to let me in. “Oh, Nellie is going to be sooo happy. Thank you, Jane.”
I shook my head to indicate it wasn’t a big deal. After looking around the empty front parlor, I pointed to the doll and then down, asking if Nellie was here. Of course, Miss Helen hadn’t been in town long enough to understand, so I fished for my pad and pencil.
“Oh, that’s right, you don’t…” She caught herself before she could say talk, but I didn’t take offense. What would be the point? She was right. “Nellie’s out back. Come on.”
We passed through the hall and into the kitchen, where preparations for dinner were in full swing. Ruby Mae had hired Miss Helen to cook for her boarders since she’d had a falling-out with her last cook—Mrs. Jefferson. But it was just as well whoever wrote the Tattler didn’t print that detail.
Out back, Nellie was employed in a complicated construction project involving twigs and pebbles and an impressively built tower. She stood when her mother stepped out onto the back porch.
“Nellie, look what Miss Jane found!” Helen held the doll up in the air, and the little girl squealed in delight. She was four years old with freckled tawny skin and thick flaming-red hair. Her mother’s complexion was a pale yellow and her dark hair didn’t hold so much as a hint of copper, so the girl must have inherited her coloring from her late father.
“Henrietta!” the child yelled, and I gathered that was the name of the unfortunate doll. Nellie raced up the steps to grab it from her mother’s hands.
“What do we say?”
“Thank you, Miss Jane,” the child lisped, and clutched the rags to her chest. I knelt to her level and whispered, “You’re welcome.” Then Nellie raced away, beaming.
“Not sure how to thank you,” Helen said. “I can’t imagine where that old thing could have been.”
I didn’t bother trying to communicate where I’d found the doll. Sometimes ignorance was bliss. The thing would definitely not stand up to a washing, and besides, there hadn’t been anything nasty in Miss Kizzie’s trash can anyway, it was mostly paper.
“Everyone here has been so kind.” Miss Helen swallowed, her eyes going glassy. “Good to know there’s still kindness in the world.” She stared at her daughter playing innocently in the grass.
I left a few minutes later, having every intention of heading to the feed store, I swear. Instead of walking back through the house, I figured I’d just go around the side, and that was when I found the home’s owner, Ruby Mae, on the porch with a man I’d never seen before.
I would have thought he was one of the Authority men except for two things—the only car parked out front was Ruby Mae’s bright red Hudson, and the man in the brown suit was Negro. Tall and broad shouldered, skin as dark as mine—like freshly tilled soil—he had a confident, determined walk as he jogged down the steps and walked away. Younger than any of the white men I’d seen that day but carrying a briefcase just like theirs.
Ruby stood with one arm wrapped around the porch post, waving at him with a big smile illuminating her face. Called out for him to “Come back anytime!” Whoever he was, she had her sights set on him, that was obvious, but something in the sharklike determination arrowing her gaze made it clear she hadn’t snared him yet. And the fact that he didn’t look back at her, not even once, like just about every other able-bodied man in town would have, meant he might not be in danger of falling for her charms. I snickered at the expression on her face and couldn’t stop myself from following after him.
The man walked down Washington Avenue and turned onto Freedom Street. His stride became more purposeful, and his pace quickened until I had to jog to keep up with him. I stayed on the other side of the road, half a block back, but he never turned around. He passed the Sunrise Bakery without even pausing to take a sniff of Miss Della’s mouthwatering treats. Walked by the Fashion Clotherie without doing a double take at the mannequin sitting out in the picture window in nothing but its unmentionables for the world to see as Miss Tamar dressed it.
When he turned onto Church Street, I nearly stumbled. Only thing down that way besides the church was the river. Seeing as it was Monday and there were no meetings scheduled, which would have had Daddy opening the church, that meant the man with the briefcase must be headed over to the banks of the Noxahatchie.
I veered down an alley and took off running for the cemetery, where I could cut through the path and take a shortcut to the river. By the time I reached the big pawpaw tree, I was huffing and puffing and sweating like a pregnant hog, but I’d beat him there.
Gravel crunched under his feet as he got closer, still walking fast, like he was going to work or was late for an important meeting, not like he was strolling to the river. The dense cluster of sweetspire bushes just off the path concealed me. I’d spent a lot of time there when we first moved to Awenasa, listening to the other kids playing in the river, knowing I’d never join them.
As the footsteps drew closer, I crouched, balanced on the balls of my feet. The man strode by, and through the leafy branches I caught a glimpse of his face.
And fell right down onto my behind.
It took me three tries to get back on my feet. Of course, my dress and the palms of my hands were covered in grit by then. I burst from the bushes, all thoughts of sneaking gone because what I thought I saw was impossible.
The entire thing had taken maybe ten seconds. Falling, trying to stand, finally succeeding. This path went only one way and dead-ended at the water’s edge. There was nowhere else to go. But as I stepped onto the gravel, I was alone. The man with the briefcase had disappeared.
I started to think maybe he hadn’t ever really been there at all. Because that brief peek I got of his face? The thing that scared me half to death and literally knocked me off my feet?
He’d worn the face of a dead man.
You will have the same question so many have asked before you—when did it all begin? However, not even Mama Yoja remembers how New Ilé first came to be. Sometimes she’ll say the island started as a speck of sand caught under the fingernail of the One Who Came Before, that rubbed and rubbed itself into a pearl large enough to be island sized. But Papa Loku will always break in and remind us that the One Who Came Before doesn’t have fingers, much less fingernails. Loku is of the opinion that our home began, as all things do, with a wish.
You see, within the mighty nothingness of the void in which it had always existed, the One Who Came Before had an awakening. A desire. It wished for an end to sameness. Something different from the eternal static nature of itself. It wished for Not Itself.
And ché was born.
Oh, you know ché, child, even if you do not know its name. Even if you call it something else, as so many do. Ché is spirit. The essence of life that runs through all things. Divine energy. The infinite possibility of otherness. Change.
Ché gave the rest of the wishes their power.
Soon, light was created. Then darkness. Then the spaces in between them all—air. Then heat. Cold. Motion. Vibration. All with their own ché running through them. And these Not Itselves, these creations, also had the ability to create. They made dawn and dusk. Sun and moon. Clouds and stars. Water and land.
Of course, water is the best of them all, if you ask me. It moves constantly, can never be still, can never be the same. With a single drop of water, you can create an entire world. The drop is the ocean; the stream is the river. Where does one begin and the other end? Water is harmony and chaos all rolled up together, one becoming all becoming one again. It is the ultimate atonement of existence. Always changing. Itself, but not itself. It is all that the One Who Came Before hoped for in its first wish.
The ché of this creation is so powerful, so fluid, so unable to be contained that both Mama Yoja and Papa Loku were born from the wish of water.
And so was I.
In a way, that means you were, too, my daughter. So, yes, one of the few things Yoja and Loku can agree on was that the water was first, and as its very nature is not to stay the same, land came fast on its heels—a desire for the water to be Not Itself. At least not all the time. The grit of sand against the shifting flow pressing against it. Forming alliances, connecting in a way the liquid never could.
Mama Yoja will say that this is how other islands were formed, but New Ilé was different. There are times she claims it has always been, that it is as timeless as the One Who Came Before and existed in a place the first creator didn’t notice until after its initial wish. Other times, she’ll say the island was fashioned from the mounds of droppings of the children of Papa Tala—her brother, created from the wish of light. His children are the flying and crawling creatures whom he wished for. They populate the lands he oversees with great care.
I’ve even heard her tell a tale about a great golden light piercing the dark of night, dimming the stars and blinding half of everyone in the world. When they could see again, the island was here. Formed by an unknown hand, created in mystery. Papa Loku, a fan of all things enigmatic, will smile at this, and not contradict a thing.
And if you want to know why this is New Ilé and where is Old Ilé, well, I ask the same thing and the elders just laugh and laugh. “Everything is new to you, my dau
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Daughter of the Merciful Deep
Leslye Penelope
Copyright © 2024 All Rights Reserved
