Mazywood

by Tananarive Due

Genres: Horror

Synopsis

S. A. Cosby's All the Sinners Bleed meets Percival Everett's Erasure in this literary thriller following the grandson of a famous Black actress from the 1920s to the 1940s, now a filmmaker himself, who returns to his grandmother's cabin retreat in the California mountains only to encounter the legacy of her rage born in Old Hollywood.

Award-winning author Tananarive Due returns with the follow-up to the multi-award-winning The Reformatory in this generational novel of rage. With flashbacks to Johnny’s grandmother—who brushed shoulders with giants like Lena Horne, Clark Gable, and Hattie McDaniel—this novel explores three generations, beginning with Mazelle Washington’s life as a young actress. Fifty years after Mazelle’s death, Johnny will discover the secret she kept and nurtured since she was a child, when she had a dark wish come true.

A monster lurks outside Mazywood, hidden for generations, and Johnny brought his family to its hunting grounds.

Release date: September 22, 2026

Publisher: S&S/Saga Press

Print pages: 512

Sample

Chapter One One
GRACETOWN, FLORIDA

SUMMER 1926

MAZELLE WASHINGTON WORSHIPPED THE WOODS.

She didn’t mind bug bites, or mysterious rustling in the brush, or twigs scratching her face and snagging her hair because the woods were so magical compared to the sameness of the cities her family had toured during her seven years of life. Rustling revealed deer, squirrels, raccoons, rabbits, possums, and animals she didn’t yet know; quick flashes of brown, gray, and black. An entire world was hidden beneath the surface of the everyday one. Mother had read her stories about enchanted forests in fairy tales, but in Gracetown the enchantments felt real.

Today, she had set out to find the Wishing Pool, wearing overalls in case she needed to crawl or climb. It wasn’t noon yet, so she had avoided the worst of the sun’s afternoon glare. She waded into the high brush nestling the stand of pines, following the rough map she had drawn from the descriptions she’d heard, past the large wooden sign boasting FRESH PECANS! and the famed oak trees bending toward each other like twins. She’d crossed the road from her house to these woods, and knew she was headed the right way when she heard the gentle creek. She’d followed that creek many times to the more shaded parts of the forest, but never as far as the Wishing Pool.

She wanted to believe that if she found the Wishing Pool and threw in a penny—as long as she didn’t touch the water in any way, even with her pinkie toe—her wish would come true the same day, or at least before morning. All the younger children at Jonathan C. Gibbs Primary School swore to the story, although the older children warned it was lies. Coincidences. Bad luck, some of the older children said. Others claimed that the Wishing Pool dried up and was impossible to find, except in the summer.

But it was summer now.

Priscilla Stephens had sat with her on the bench at lunchtime on the last day of school and told her how to make her wish, which she’d heard from her sister. Wishes always try to trick you, she warned her. So you have to say what you want without leaving nothin’ out. Down to every little itty-bitty thing.

Mazelle had tried twice to find the Wishing Pool and given up, once because she was due for her chores and once because it was getting too dark—the woods changed its face at night, and her parents would be sick with worry if she didn’t come home in time for supper. But today she had plenty of time. Mazelle ran past oak trees that had fooled her on her previous attempts, racing to follow the creek deeper into the wild woods.

She came upon it with a gasp as it appeared in the sun’s rays splitting the treetops.

Grass shimmered like emeralds in the clearing ahead, so striking that she barely noticed the bending trunks of the mighty twin oaks, their leaves blending at their crowns. No grass grew in the deepest pond at the center, but it spread outward into the soggy grasses, more like a swamp. She looked down and saw she had almost stumbled into it—and if she had squatted lower to get a better look, she would have seen that the tippy-toe of her scuffed leather shoe had dipped beyond the spot where the water met the mud.

Hand shaking, Mazelle reached into her pocket and clutched her shiny copper penny in her clammy fingertips. She was about to toss it as hard as she could toward the Wishing Pool when she remembered to glance at the details of the wish she had written on back of her map. It would be foolish to come so far and fail at proper wishing. She took a breath and threw.

The penny arced, flying higher than she’d expected, but it still landed almost exactly where she’d aimed, rippling from the center of the pool after a tiny splash.

Mazelle closed her eyes because that was how she prayed.

“I wish I had a best friend forever,” she said. “Someone to play with whenever I want. Who’ll love me better than anyone else. Who’ll keep me safe from anything bad.” She didn’t want to say in her wish that she wanted protection from her terrible older sisters, especially Doris, although it was true. She peeked at her wrinkled page again. She’d almost forgotten the most important part! “And I wish for my best friend to do shows with me, and we’ll have the best act in the whole world.”

Mazelle hoped she hadn’t ruined her wish when she opened her eyes, but Priscilla had never told her to close them. Not knowing what else to say, Mazelle whispered, “Amen.”

The sudden silence was an explosion in reverse.

No whirring bugs. No birdcalls or whispering leaves. Mazelle hadn’t realized how noisy the woods were until the blanket of silence draped over her, as if the world had gone to sleep. Clouds she had not seen earlier muted the sunlight and turned the day gray. Mazelle remembered she was holding her breath when she saw red spots and swayed, dizzy.

Two birds squabbling overhead broke the quiet. Mazelle hadn’t really expected to find her new best friend waiting on the other side of the Wishing Pool, but maybe she had a little. When she looked around and saw no one, she felt more alone than before her wish.

“I’m here!” she called out. “Come be my friend!”

The birds stopped fighting and fluttered away. No one answered. Of course.

The Wishing Pool, she decided, was just another lie.

On her way home, a dog was blocking her path in the middle of McCormack Road.

The dog wasn’t big, but at Mazelle’s petite size, it wasn’t small either. Mazelle was in a bad mood after her gutting disappointment, and she didn’t care a nickel for dogs. Her family had never kept pets because they spent so much time on the road. The only dogs she met were ragged strays, so she viewed children and dogs as natural enemies like gators and bobcats—except she didn’t have sharp claws or teeth to fight back. And this dog was sitting ahead of her, fur matted as if it had crawled out of the rust-colored mud that dirtied her shoes from the woods. It was filthier than any city dog, caked in sludge with only two gray-white rings around its eyes to show its true color. The dog didn’t look natural from the start.

When she stopped walking, the dog stood up, ears high at attention, tail wagging like it was trying to take flight. The dog might look like it was smiling, but all she saw were teeth that could bite through her clothes and crunch her bones.

“Git!” she said. “Get away!”

The dog only wagged a tail so short that it seemed chopped in half. Mazelle didn’t know enough about the ways of dogs to understand that a wagging tail was a happy occasion, so the frantic motion from the stumpy tail looked like defiance. When his paws pitched forward, he looked like he was ready to launch at her.

She picked up a stick nearly as wide as her palm, waving it like a sword. Her heartbeat was throbbing in her hand, but she was ready to break this dog’s skull if she had to. That’s how easy killing to defend herself would come to Mazelle Washington from the time she wasn’t as tall as the McCormacks’ cattle fence.

But the dog did something she’d never seen any dog do: This dog lowered its head, let out a whimper… and collapsed its front legs, rear haunches still raised up high. The effect sounded crazy as she thought the word, but her eyes saw it plainly: This dog was bowing to her like one of King Arthur’s knights in the stories Mother taught her at the schoolhouse. If this had been a grown man in shining armor instead of a muddy dog, he was bowing exactly as she’d imagined a knight should revere his queen.

“Good dog!” she said. His stumpy little tail wagged harder.

Maybe this dog had escaped from a circus that came through Tallahassee, Marianna, or Quincy, the closest bigger towns. Mazelle’s thoughts ignited with fantasies of showing up her older brother and sisters, who had traveled with their parents as the Washington All-American Family Troupe—before Mother decided she was tired of living in dirty train cars and boardinghouses on the road. Dorothy and Doris teased Mazelle that she never could have fit into the act because she didn’t have any talents. No talents! She could tap-dance pretty good and do backflips three or four times without stopping, which was more than anyone else in the family could do except maybe Daddy, before his back got stiff (which was probably the real reason he quit to take a job clerking for her uncle Harold, the Negro undertaker, when he got the offer).

Since she had grown up watching her family in show business and seen every circus trick and stunt imaginable, Mazelle already knew the potential in a talented dog. In Tuscaloosa, she’d seen a tiny dog fixed with a fake lion’s mane become the circus’s biggest attraction, with audiences laughing themselves silly as a clown pretended to be a “lion tamer” who shrieked with fear whenever the dog chased him. Bowing was a good start, but maybe she could train him to…

“Dance!” she blurted to the dog. (Or was she only thinking the word?)

Whether the command had been spoken or unspoken, the muddy dog stood up on two legs and whirled around as dainty as you please, like the ballerina on Mama’s jewelry case that tinkled when she opened it. All he was missing was a frilly tutu. She was so excited that she forgot she’d ever been afraid. She ignored his doggy smell and took hold of his mud-slickened front paws to join him in his dance. They were very nearly eye to eye when the dog stood on his back legs, the perfect size for dance partners.

And those eyes! Brown pools of love stared back at her. She and the dog had just met, but those eyes said that this dog would give his life for her. Devotion shone from beyond the mud rings, and his mouth was a wide grin, his bright pink tongue swinging as he panted with joy. And even better, this dog could help her family raise money to fix the leaky roof and buy the automobile Daddy said he wished he could afford.

“First I’ve gotta get you cleaned up,” Mazelle said. “If I don’t wash off all this nasty mud, you won’t have a chance when I take you home. Then you better keep doing tricks when I tell you, or Daddy will chase you away with a broom. You hear me?”

The dog did hear her. She knew this not only because of the way his ears twitched, excited, but he also let out a polite, obedient bark. Still grinning.

From that moment on, Mazelle was convinced that the dog had not only heard her but that he understood every word she spoke—and maybe some of the words she didn’t speak. None of this struck her as strange, since she knew other children in Gracetown with lizards who waited for them on the porch after school or wild hares who met them on the road and followed them wherever they went. Or rougher creatures in the swamp you’d better hope would not follow you, or so her classmates said. Such things were not unusual in Gracetown, so why shouldn’t this dog be able to follow her silent commands?

In that instant with her palms clasping the dog’s muddy paws, a strange thought tried to surface—Did this dog crawl out of the muddy ground?—in the same moment she wondered if she had conjured this dog at the Wishing Pool. She’d asked for a best friend, but she hadn’t specified a human being. Was this the Wishing Pool’s answer to her loneliness? Her sisters, who were twins (and being identical twins was the biggest part of their “talent,” even if they wouldn’t admit it), stayed in their room gossiping and looking at Harper’s and Collier’s and never invited her to join them. Even Brother didn’t spend time with her anymore since he got a job driving the undertaker’s Model T, trying to save money for college. Mazelle hated the ten-year gap between her and her sisters, which they said meant she was an “accident.” Although she didn’t like them much, she always craved to be near them, as if they held a secret to her future. She felt like a ghost in her own house, with Daddy behind his newspaper pages, Mother at the stove, and her sisters hiding from chores in their room.

Her friend had arrived, muddy or not. Smelly or not. Ready to lead her to a new life.

Mazelle hugged the dog in the middle of McCormack Road.

“I think I’ll name you Scout.”

As soon as she named her dog, Mazelle was filled with feverish anxiety. Giving Scout a name made him hers, and she couldn’t stand the prospect of losing him. She would run away from home with Scout if she had to, she vowed.

But it might not come to that. Not if she was smart—and everyone said she was very smart.

Mazelle filled up a bathing tin with well water behind their wood-frame house and scrubbed Scout for an hour with a washrag to try to get him clean. Every time she washed off one layer of mud, she unburied another. At times, he seemed dirtier than before she started, the water growing into such a dark and murky sludge that it was like washing him in mud.

But under the direct pumps of well water, a miracle emerged: Scout was light-colored, nearly white, after he shook off the water and drenched her. While she toweled him off, his fur dried in delicate ringlets that made him not only clean—but handsome. Special.

“Supper!” Mother called through the kitchen window. “Come wash up, Mazelle!”

Scout had been so quiet that no one else knew he was there. Mazelle was eager to show him off, but she knew that if she tried to delay eating, no one would be in a good mood for his show. The smell of Mother’s cornbread made Mazelle’s mouth water too.

“You sit right here,” Mazelle told Scout, leaving him on the rear stoop. “Don’t move. And don’t you dirty yourself up. I’ll be right back after supper.”

Scout licked her cheek instead of barking. And sat to wait.

Through most of the meal, she was sure she’d dreamed the dancing dog. She fidgeted in her hardback chair, trying to crane over far enough to see Scout through the kitchen window, but she wasn’t tall enough. She was bouncing so much that Papa looked up from his Tallahassee Daily Democrat to tell her to be still. Mazelle felt herself disappear at suppertime: Papa dreaming about faraway places he missed, her sisters chatting loudly with Mother to hear their own voices, and Brother silently scheming how he would sneak out later to see his girlfriend, who was such a secret to everyone but Mazelle that she wondered what was wrong with her.

In that moment, feeling insignificant, Mazelle doubted her plan. Her heart raced as she imagined all of them laughing at her for believing a stray dog who’d crawled out of the mud would join their family and somehow help their fortunes. It seemed so unlikely that Mazelle was on the verge of deciding that she should chase the dog away when—

Scout barked.

All eyes at the table came to Mazelle. “We have an act!”

Mazelle’s family gathered in a semicircle just beyond the back porch in the patch of yard worn to red soil from their feet. All of them waited to see her promised act—once a show business family, always a show business family. Even her sisters were grudgingly curious, and Brother seemed to have wrenched his mind away from thoughts of his secret lover. “But we’re not keeping this dog,” Mother muttered as she waited. Ha. She would see.

For better theatrics, Mazelle stood behind the sheet hanging on the clothesline. Scout trotted up and sat beside her, as if he knew he was supposed to be behind the curtain too.

“Where’d you get this dog from?” Brother asked. “You been feedin’ him out here?”

“Shhhhh,” Mama hissed. “She’s doing her little show.”

“Yes—let her do her ‘little show,’ ” Doris said, and she and Dottie tittered.

Standing behind the curtain, where she could only see their outlines through the thin cotton, Mazelle realized that her knees were knocking together. She was nervous. She whispered the word, tasting the idea on her tongue.

Mazelle had never been nervous before a show. She’d pranced on stages with her family from the time she was still wearing diaper pins. She sang in the church children’s choir as loudly as she could, even when she was off-key: The congregants (the audience) always cheered and swung their handkerchiefs at her, fanning air at her, and leaped to their feet when they witnessed a child singing with such audaciousness. Once, an old woman in the front pew had fainted from fervor while Mazelle sang. (Her love of an audience might be a pinch stronger than her love for God, but the weeping old ladies swaying to their feet didn’t need to know that.)

So why was she so afraid here? Now?

The answer came to her as she raised her trembling hand to the curtain: She had never wanted anything as much as she wanted to dazzle her family with Scout. Gram had always said to ask what was truly in your heart, not only what you thought you deserved.

“God,” she whispered, “can you make this the best show in the whole world?”

Scout licked her hand, the one hanging limply at her side while she breathed in deep like Mama’s voice teacher had taught her, from her belly.

I am the biggest star, Mazelle Washington thought. And she flung the curtain aside with so much force that one lopsided tip fell to the ground. Her sisters laughed again, but Mazelle barely heard them past the excitement pulsing at her temples.

“Presenting!” she said in her finest imitation of a ringmaster’s voice. “The one and only Mazelle Washington—and Scout the Wonder Dog!”

She bowed. And Scout bowed beside her, in perfect synchronization.

Her sisters’ laughter stopped so suddenly that Mazelle cut her eyes up at them to see their faces go slack, as if air were seeping out of them.

“Well, ain’t that clever?” Mother said, clapping already, but Daddy touched her shoulder so he could watch without distraction. He’d pulled out his pipe, holding it between his lips unlit. Waiting to see what was next.

“Do you love me, Scout?” Mazelle said. “Bark once.”

Scout barked once, just as she knew he would.

“If you really love me, Scout, bark two times.”

And so Scout did. One bark. Two.

Brother, who had been slouching against the side of the house, straightened to his full height, peering at Mazelle as if she were a stranger.

“Stand up on two legs,” Mazelle said to Scout, and he pitched himself upright, struggling to balance himself on two legs.

“And now, dear sir, will you dance with me?” Mazelle said.

Scout hopped toward her, his paws landing on her shoulders when he almost fell forward. Mama gasped, probably afraid he would bite her. Mazelle allowed one paw to rest on her shoulder and took hold of the other one just like she had on the road, and the two of them danced, one-two-three, one-two-three, as if dogs and children danced all the time. Mazelle hummed “Sweet Georgia Brown” in time with their waltzing feet.

“How long you been practicin’ this?” Brother asked.

“Where’d you say this dog came from?” Daddy said. His voice was low and quiet, the tone he reserved for the times he needed everyone to hush and listen, like when strangers were coming to the door. “Who’s he belong to?”

Mazelle was disappointed that the audience had interrupted her show with questions—only the worst audiences did that—but no one ignored Daddy when his voice went low. The dancing was over. Scout dropped back down to four paws, waiting for whatever was next.

“He don’t belong to nobody, Daddy,” Mazelle said. “I found him on the road.”

“Found him when?” From Daddy’s voice, she thought she might be in trouble.

“Today,” Mazelle said. “Right before supper.”

“You sure you didn’t steal it from somebody?” Doris said. She was quick to think the worst of Mazelle—and everyone, really.

“I didn’t! He’s mine!” Mazelle shouted. She had a temper. Everyone said that too.

“Y’all hush,” Daddy said, starting to pace. He stared down at Scout and shook his head. “Obviously the dog is well trained. Someone’s gonna come looking for him.”

Mazelle would have burst out crying on the spot if she hadn’t remembered her plan to run away. No one was going to take Scout away from her. Ever.

Brother snapped his fingers loudly, and she and Scout both turned to look at him.

“Bark two times,” Brother said.

Scout just stared, looking as dumb as any regular dog.

“What’s the trick?” Dottie asked.

“It’s not a trick!” Mazelle said. “He only listens to me.”

“Show us,” Daddy said. “Do another one.”

For the next two hours, until long past dark, Mazelle did just that.