Excerpt from The Lost Book of Adana Moreau by Michael Zapata, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Why not?" asked the pirate.

"Americans are greedy tígueritos," she said, "they're shit."

"And me?"

"I don't know yet. Maybe you're shit. Maybe you're not shit."

Still, she thought about her prospects on that occupied island and decided to leave Santo Domingo. On the ship voyage she met a boy who looked out of place. He had deep, sky-black eyes. When she asked the boy where he was from, he said he was from nowhere.

"So, you're an orphan," she said.

"An orphan," he said and smiled politely.

"Like me," she said.

Like everybody, she thought. Orphans are all the world really has left.

For four days, she lived on the deck of the ship and slept near the orphan boy. She listened as he talked about war and mechanical soldiers and an eternal library that he would one day discover and never leave. He's mad, thought the servant girl. He spoke Spanish well enough, but sometimes he sang in a language that she didn't understand. The songs were like a melismatic trance. One morning, in the middle of a song, he stopped singing and told her that the ship was entering the eye of the Gulf of Mexico.

"How do you know where the eye is?" she asked the boy, teasing him.

"Just look," he said and shrugged.

The sea was deep blue and alien and as vast as the sky. She imagined that in the distant future the end of the world would have its origins there and for some unknown reason this put her at ease. When the ship arrived in New Orleans, the pirate was waiting for her. A few days later, he asked for her hand in marriage and she said yes.

On April 7th, 1920, Maxwell Moreau was born in a one-room apartment near the Barracks Street Wharf. His mother labored for seventeen hours and during painful bursts of activity she squeezed her eyes shut and tried to focus on the smells of coffee and bananas and boiled crawfish and the blows and whistles of faraway ocean liners. This was something, she thought, that all mothers giving birth in New Orleans probably did. When Maxwell Moreau finally came out, the pirate knew that his son would not be a pirate like him, spending his life on the surface of the sea, a loud and violent sea that swelled with creatures and myths and drove men to early deaths or, worse, to an asylum.



He swore to it and told his wife that their son had ochre eyes, which were the pigment of earth.

The baby Maxwell Moreau cried and cried and his mother held him to her breast and whispered son et lumière, which was something her husband had taught her to say in French and which meant sound and light and was everything the earth wasn't.

The Dominicana and the pirate soon bought a home on Melpomene Avenue. Occasionally, the pirate worked for a wealthy Creole smuggler, often for long periods of time at sea or by river and then by marsh in order to help him hide jugs of Cuban rum in the trunks of cypress trees or guard him as he tried to strike deals with Isleños, laughing or rather pretending to laugh, which was a type of threat, at least according to the pirate who listened to most anybody with a story to tell, especially an inscrutable Isleño. He might as well have pistols for ears and a shotgun for a tongue, he might as well start a gang war, the pirate once told his wife, but he still went and worked for the wealthy Creole smuggler and she still saw him off and waved as he boarded a motorboat. Sometimes, when the wealthy Creole smuggler turned his back to the pirate, he saluted him in mockery of the United States Navy. Then, more often than not, the Dominicana stood and chatted with the wealthy Creole smuggler's wife in the lilting heat and saunter of the Louisiana sun and watched the trill of fishing boats and egrets drift over the Mississippi River as if they were comets lost in the creation of things.

Excerpted from The Lost Book of Adana Moreau by Michael Zapata. Copyright © 2020 by Michael Zapata. Excerpted by permission of Hanover Square Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.