Excerpt from Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Mama tosses the weapon to me and picks up her childhood staff, jagged as lightning. I sweat, fear spiking my armpits. My heart thumps in my ears. Mama whips her spear, and we begin to spar: with every spin, every strike, every stab, my mother becomes more fire, less herself—more licking, liquid flame. I don't like it, but then I don't have time to like it, because I must parry, block, jab. The world turns to one whipping, one humming, and us spinning with it.

When we return to the cabin, Nan and her two oldest children are asleep. Nan and her family share the cabin with us. Her youngest two are awake, and they cannot stop crying. They hold each other in their blankets, breath hitching from sobbing, while their mother and siblings doze. Nan has always diverted her love for her four children. She throttles it to a trickle, to an occasional softness in her orders: be still, hush, don't cry, and the rest of her care is all hard slaps and fists. She won't love what she can't keep. My mother reaches out to me, and I grasp her hand as we tuck into our bedding. Mama has always been a woman who hides a tender heart: a woman who tells me stories in a leaf-rustling whisper, a woman who burns like a sulfur lantern as she leads me through the world's darkness, a woman who gives me a gift when she unsheathes herself in teaching me to fight once a month.

THE NEXT MORNING, MY mother wakes me before the sun; she smells like hay, magnolia, and fresh game meat from last night's midnight sweat. I'm exhausted. I want to roll over in our blanket, yank it over my head and eat more sleep, but Mama runs a firm hand down my back.

"Annis, my girl. Wake up."

I pull on my clothes, tuck my blouse into my skirt as we walk toward my sire's house. Can't help the sulkiness dogging my tucks, dragging my steps. My mother walks a little ahead, and I punch down my resentfulness. Mama is almost running: she has to get to the oven, needs to light and stoke the fire within it, heat it so that she can do the morning baking. I know she is ordered to the house just as much as I am, what with all I have to gather and deliver and clean for her, to aid her in this morning, but I am short-tempered and tired until my mother begins to limp, a little stitch in her walk. Last night pains her, too. I trot to her, slip my hand through the crook of her elbow, and rub her arm. Look on the soft down of her ear, her woven hair.

"Mama?" I say.

"Sometimes I want something sweet," she breathes, tapping her fingers on mine. "Don't you?"

"Naw," I say. "I want salt."

"Mama Aza always said it wasn't good to want sweets. I'd hunt them and eat so much my hands'd stain red and blue." Mama sighs. "Now having a bit of sweet is all I can think about."

My sire's house hulks, its insides pinned by creaks. My mother bends to the stove. I gather wood and haul water and take both up the stairs, peeking into my sire's daughters' rooms. They are my half sisters; I have known this since my mother first taught me to fight, yet envy and distaste still burrow in me every morning when I tend to them. They sleep with their mouths open, pink scraped across their cheeks, their eyelids twitching like fish who swim in the shallows. Their red hair snarls in knotted threads. They will sleep until their father wakes them with knocks on their doors, far past the first blush of dawn. I tamp my feelings down, closing my face.

My sire is at his desk, in his dressing gown, writing. His room is stuffy with cold smoke and old sweat.

"Annis," he says, nodding.

"Sir," I say.

I expect his eyes to glaze over me as they do every morning, like water over a smooth stone. But his gaze snags on me, square, then trails me around his room as I fill his washbasin, gather his clothes, grip his chamber pot. He appraises me in the same way he studies his horses, his attention as sure and close as his touch on a long-maned neck, a muscled haunch, a bowed, saddle-worn back. I keep my eyes on my hands, and it's only when I descend the stairs that I realize they are shaking, his mess sloshing in the pot.

Excerpted from Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward. Copyright © 2023 by Jesmyn Ward. Excerpted by permission of Scribner. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.