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

I stop, digging Mama's staff into the dirt, beaten hard by our feet.

"Tell me about my granddaddy, please," I say, looking at my toes, our feet the same shape. Mama stops. She's told me this story many times, the first when I was a girl, in one of our earliest lessons.

"Mama Aza loved a soldier who stood guard outside the castle walls and took him as a lover." She frowns. "The king sent her and the man who loved her to the coast. They was walked to the white men, to the water that don't have no edge. The whites made her walk through a door to a beach, and then put her down in a ship." My mother reaches out, pinches my shirt, and tugs before letting go. "They stole her. Bought her here." She tugs again. "Why you ask?"

I shrug. Her second toe longer than her big toe. My second toe longer than my big toe. Shoes always hurt our feet.

"Mama Aza knew the power of men before she got to that boat. When her daddy brung her to the palace, the king tell her father: I take her for my wife, but she bound to the cutlass, the bow, the axe. Mama Aza said there were hundreds, hundreds of wives, and one king."

Mama swings, and I block it.

"No other men allowed to live in the palace besides the king," Mama said.

There wouldn't have been any other men there with the power to weigh and measure Mama Aza, to appraise her like my father did me. No man but the king: stout, jewelry laden, finely clothed. Perhaps his tononu, master of the house and eunuch, at his ear.

I wonder what the royal household saw in my grandmother. If they saw something in her that spoke of power, that told them she could bear more than the weight of her frame. When my mother tells Mama Aza's stories, I see her in my head, lean and long like my mother. But sometimes I think I'm wrong, that the royal women looked at Mama Aza and saw a girl like me: gangly, water muscled, cup hipped. Maybe Mama Aza had learned to hide her fierceness so good, all the women and the king saw was a thin girl with a spindly line running from head to toe that pulled her upright, defiant.

When the king designated Mama Aza an amazon, did she feel relief? Joy at knowing she wasn't beautiful enough to be one of his true wives? That she would not have to submit beneath him, to bear him on her body and then deliver him blood, babies, and breast milk? Was she happy to know that she would learn how to satisfy his other desires, for blood and loot? That she would serve him in battle, hunting elephants, with a knife and spear? That she would bear bundles for him that contained heads instead of infants? Or did it grieve her that she was bound by another invisible rope, had to surrender herself in this palace full of women in thrall to one man?

"I don't understand why Mama Aza wouldn't share her mama name. She taught me that the ancestors come if you call them. That if you having trouble, you pray to them, and they give help," Mama says, swinging again. I miss the block. "Maybe she think her mama should have tried harder to keep her, and she carried the pain of it, still." Mama jabs, and I parry. The night quiet of people, loud with bugs around us. "Some think those that die come back if they die in a bad way, a way so awful Great God turn they face. Fon believed spirits come for you no matter the why, no matter when, if you call. You swing now," Mama says. I swing and she blocks and swings. I barely knock it away. I am breathing harder than I should be. Mama steps back and holds her spear out, ready. "Don't think of me like that, you hear? I always come for you. Beyond this time, into the next. Always." She steps close, so near our knees almost touch, and wipes wet from my face: half caress, half swipe. "Now, why you ask for Mama Aza's story again?"

I tell my mother, haltingly. The words crowd one another as the panic I felt in that room froths up out of me, and I have to close my eyes to speak, to get the story out.

"He was," I say.

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.