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

"You're taller than your mother," he says. Where the tutor's voice is high and breathy, my sire's voice is deep, grating. I can't help but startle, dropping his quilt. "Come," he says. "Remove my boots."

I have never done this before. I stand away from the bed, looking down at my own beaten shoes, so worn at the sides that I can see my toes. I can't move.

"You heard me," he says. His red hair glints. It is not a question.

My mother has told me the story of how my sire violated her. Of how he came across her, alone in one of the upper hallways of the house, outside of an empty bedroom. How he shoved her into that bare room and bore her down to the floorboards. How he flayed the softest parts of her. How he raped her that time, and then another time at the river, and another, and another, until she stopped counting and became pregnant with me. Years later, he married the white woman, yellow haired with thin wrists, who would later die in the bearing of his twin girls.

As I kneel at his feet, I wonder if my mother felt her heart beating as quickly as the heart of a rabbit hunched in a field at twilight, shying from the shadow of the hawk. I pull at his laces, as far away as I can be from him, so that I have to reach. My arms burn with my awkward cowering, but I unknot and shuck his boots as quickly as I can. His socks smell of overripe cheese. He raises one arm, makes as if to palm my head, grab my hair, pull me toward his lap, but I rise and lurch away from him and am out of the door before he can touch one curl. Still, I see the way he seems fixed on my mouth, my mane, which falls dense and shiny, so resistant to braids, and reflects his own copper glint in its strands.

I would shave it all off, every bit.

THE YOLK OF THE moon is high in the sky by the time my mother wakes me and we creep from the cabin, from Nan and her children grinding their teeth and talking in their sleep. We walk barefoot to the clearing, making as little noise as we can, stepping on the balls of our feet carefully in bare dirt patches. I sweep our footprints behind us with a tree branch my mother twists from a pine. Ever since I've been old enough to remember, my mother has asked me to tell her. Tell me, she says, if anybody ever touches you. It's what she said to me the first time she told me the story of how my sire stalked and violated her. Please, Annis, she said. I want to tell her about my sire before we spar, but she digs out the spear and staff so quickly, tossing them through the silver-washed air, that I cannot do more than swing my staff up to block hers, and then we are whirring and whirring, shuddering to a stop before attacking each other again. With every block, every strike, every jab, there is a coil in my chest, and it winds tighter and tighter before it begins to burn. What is the point of this? I ask myself. What is the point of this if I cannot use it?

The moon rises, and I am wrung dry, the fury of our fight leaving behind only a slick of resentment. I jab at her and try to forget.

"What was Aza's mama's name?" I ask.

Mama bids me swing, and I squirrel through her defense and touch her stomach.

"Don't know. Mama Aza never told me. Say when her father took her off to give her as a wife to the king, her mama followed them into the morning. Trailed them for miles 'til her father stopped and argued with her mother, saying it was an honor for Mama Aza to serve, that she would be fed and clothed and revered: a king's wife. Say her mama took her face in her hands and kissed her on each cheek and her forehead, tried to whisper something to her, but couldn't talk for crying." Mama pushed my elbow lower. "Mama Aza say once her and her father got to Dahomey, where the king live, the spear became her mama. The cutlass her daddy."

Mama frowns, her face wrinkled as a tablecloth.

"The warrior wives had servants. But all the wives was servants, too. Had to train and parade. Had to move at the king's direction. And warriors couldn't have a family, couldn't have no babies. Was against the king's law."

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.