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

My sire trips into his open doorway: he has hurried here. I jab the last corner under his mattress, rise, and stand, balancing on the balls of my feet. I take a step toward the door. Run, my mama said, run. But I ain't got nowhere to go, a little voice says. I take one breath, and then another, the air cool in the room but burning down my nose, and I know I can't surrender to what he wants to do to me. I know that I don't have my mother's self-control, know that I will struggle with him, that I will use my elbows like hammers, my legs like staffs, that I will make my knees fists. I think of Mama Aza squatting in the cabins, infant in her arms, afterbirth still in her, and this man's father, my grandfather, standing over her, and how it must have rung through her head: This is wrong wrong wrong. I hear it now. How the knowing sink in my stomach.

"Annis?" my mother's voice sounds from the hallway beyond the door. She has opened the door, and stands in the open palm of it. "We done." Her arms band her stomach. Her head is down, but then she raises it and I know that eyes can be weapons, too, that they can glitter like small knives, like them used to gut a fish. I have never seen anyone look past my sire as my mother does now, him a buzzing gnat, unworthy of notice, of even a waved hand. "Come," she says.

My sire has his own signs for anger, but I don't look for them. I edge past him to my mother, her bladed hand, the long, dim hallway, the creaking stairs, the quiet kitchen, the murmuring garden, the loud night. We walk past the cabins, past the fields, into the forest to the clearing. We walk as far away from my sire's house as we can. We do not dig out our weapons. We make a bed in the soil we have beaten soft with our feet and pillow our heads with our arms. My mother curls around my back, her breath soft on my neck.

"There are herbs," Mama says. "I'll look for them tomorrow. We should have them." She circles my stomach and pulls tight. "He won't stop. Every time after the first, I grabbed this," Mama whispers. She pulls something out of her braided hair that looks like a white awl, thin as a needle.

"What's that?"

"It was Mama Aza's. A piece of a elephant tusk. She got it on one of her hunts." Mama puts it in my hand, and it is smooth and warm as her skin.

"Once I got myself past the feeling of hitting him with it, right here"—she touches my neck, below my ear, where my heartbeat thrums—"I tried to remember that I still had plenty inside he couldn't take."

The shoulders of the trees shake with wind.

"Mama Aza said bringing down an elephant is a good way to teach somebody small how to beat somebody big. How you have to be cunning, have to be smart. If you not, you don't live through it." Mama slips the ivory awl back into her hair. "You remember that, too, you hear. You don't need this ivory or them spears. In this world, you your own weapon."

The moon blanches the sky; she is nearly set before we sleep.

In the hour before dawn, there is a perfect silence. I wake, my mother's snoring hushed in my ear. I slide my hand up her forearm to the muscley meat before her shoulder and squeeze, hard enough to feel the push of her flesh under my fingers, soft enough not to wake her. I turn on my back so I can see her face: her open mouth, her cheekbones fallen with ease. The moon has set behind the trees, but its light still suffuses our clearing: milky glass. Some nights I steal these moments for myself; what my mother demands in fighting, I take back now. My mama's face is slack as a child's; her limbs are so close, they could be my own. I put my hand on her neck, feel the rush of blood there, the red river that binds her to me. I feel as I only can with her.

A buzzing hiccup sounds from the ruined tree above us, and suddenly, the clearing fills with a grating whisper. I squint against the sky and see trailing garlands of black dots rising from the trunk in a humming chorus. I rub the down of my mother's arm. It takes moments more, each one stretching thick as honey, to decipher the dark rising, the sibilant singing: a beehive has taken root in the tree, and now they wake and go forth with the dawn. A little more, I think. I will let my mother sleep a little more, drift skyward in the place of dreams, before rousing her, waking her, pulling her back here.

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.