“What is it? What’s wrong?”
In the living room, Doll could hear August’s hushed explanation, which was followed by Ann’s shrill “She did what?”
In a moment, Ann was at Doll’s side, cradling her against her bosom.
“My sweet, sweet Jesus,” she murmured. “What kind of mother would do this to her own flesh and blood?”
August shook his head in dismay. “Caroline is hot now. Maybe in a day or two—”
Ann’s head snapped up. “In a day or two what? Don’t tell me you’re thinking about sending this poor child back to that woman?”
August was thinking exactly that.
“Oh, I won’t have it, August. Next time might be the last time for this little girl. Doll is staying right here with us.”
* * *
August and Ann had a child of their own named Vesta. A six-year-old with a lisp and tender ways. At the dinner table that night, Vesta shoveled forkfuls of steamed rice and baked chicken into her mouth, all the while keeping her eyes glued to Doll.
After dinner, Ann dressed Doll in one of her halfslips. “You’ll wear this until I can find you a decent nightgown,” Ann said, before tucking the girl into bed alongside Vesta.
She read them a story, and planted soft kisses on each of their foreheads. The “I love you” Ann shared before closing the bedroom door was big enough for both girls.
In the darkness Vesta whispered, “I been praying for a sister.”
Doll’s hand moved across the empty space between them, found Vesta’s hand, and squeezed it. “Me too,” she said.
* * *
Doll slipped into the Hilson family as easily as a lost puzzle piece they didn’t know was missing.
“See, I told you,” Ann commented to August one day as she sat darning socks, “that Coraline was the crazy one. Doll’s been nothing but a joy.” She smiled to herself, knotted the stitch, and then used her teeth to sever the thread. “She’s just the sweetest thing.”
August, who was seated across the room sucking on his pipe and reading the newspaper, nodded in agreement.
A few years later, Ann’s words—She’s just the sweetest thing—would float back to August as he slid inside of Doll and exploded into a million points of light.
End of Excerpt
More about Gathering of Waters.
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Gathering of Waters is available in paperback and e-book editions. Our print books are available from our website and in online and brick & mortar bookstores everywhere. The digital edition is available wherever e-books are sold.
Following her best-selling, award-winning novel Glorious, McFadden produces a fantastical historical novel featuring the spirit of Emmett Till.
The New York Times selected Gathering of Waters as one of the 100 Notable Books of 2012!
The Washington Post named Gathering of Waters one of 2012's 50 best books!
"McFadden works a kind of miracle—not only do [her characters] retain their appealing humanity; their story eclipses the bonds of history to offer continuous surprises . . . Beautiful and evocative, Gathering of Waters brings three generations to life . . . The real power of the narrative lies in the richness and complexity of the characters. While they inhabit these pages they live, and they do so gloriously and messily and magically, so that we are at last sorry to see them go, and we sit with those small moments we had with them and worry over them, enchanted, until they become something like our own memories, dimmed by time, but alive with the ghosts of the past, and burning with spirits."—Jesmyn Ward, New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice)
"Read it aloud. Hire a chorus to chant it to you and anyone else interested in hearing about civil rights and uncivil desires, about the dark heat of hate, about the force of forgiveness."—Alan Cheuse, All Things Considered, NPR
"McFadden combines events of Biblical proportions—from flooding to resurrection—with history to create a cautionary, redemptive tale that spans the early twentieth century to the start of Hurricane Katrina. She compellingly invites readers to consider the distinctions between 'truth or fantasy' . . . In McFadden's boldly spun yarn, consequences extend across time and place. This is an arresting historical portrait of Southern life with reimagined outcomes, suggesting that hope in the enduring power of memory can offer healing where justice does not suffice."—Publishers Weekly
"The rich text is shaped by the African American storytelling tradition and layered with significant American histories. Recalling the woven spirituality of Toni Morrison's Beloved, this work will appeal to readers of mystic literature."—Library Journal
"McFadden makes powerful use of imagery in this fantastical novel of ever-flowing waters and troubled spirits."—Booklist
"As strange as this may sound, Bernice L. McFadden has created a magical, fantastic novel centered around the notorious tragedy of Emmett Till's murder. This is a startling, beautifully written piece of work."—Dennis Lehane, author of Mystic River
"In her new novel, Gathering of Waters, Bernice McFadden brings her own special vision to the unfortunate story of Emmett Till and his murder in Money, Mississippi. This moving and magical novel, which traces the generations leading up to and away from that horrible night in 1955, drew me in immediately and swept me along through its richly imagined world. I couldn't stop reading, caught up as I was in that enticing place between truth and fantasy, the here-and-now and the what-was, the living and the dead, the ugliness and the beauty, the hatred and the love. What a rich chorus of voices Bernice McFadden has fashioned from this place called Money."—Lee Martin, author of Break the Skin and The Bright Forever
GATHERING OF WATERS is a deeply engrossing tale narrated by the town of Money, Mississippi—a site both significant and infamous in our collective story as a nation. Money is personified in this haunting story, which chronicles its troubled history following the arrival of the Hilson and Bryant families.
TASS HILSON AND EMMETT TILL were young and in love when Emmett was brutally murdered in 1955. Anxious to escape the town, Tass marries Maximillian May and relocates to Detroit.
FORTY YEARS LATER, AFTER THE DEATH OF HER HUSBAND, Tass returns to Money and fantasy takes flesh when Emmett Till's spirit is finally released from the dank, dark waters of the Tallahatchie River. The two lovers are reunited, bringing the story to an enchanting and profound conclusion.
GATHERING OF WATERS mines the truth about Money, Mississippi, as well as the town's families, and threads their history over decades. The bare-bones realism—both disturbing and riveting—combined with a magical realm in which ghosts have the final say, is reminiscent of Toni Morrison's Beloved.
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Glorious is available in paperback and e-book editions. Our print books are available from our website and in online and brick & mortar bookstores everywhere. The digital edition is available wherever e-books are sold.
Award-winning novelist Bernice L. McFadden's highly anticipated new historical novel set amidst the Harlem Renaissance.
Glorious was a finalist for the 2011 NAACP Image Award for Fiction!
"McFadden's lively and loving rendering of New York hews closely to the jazz-inflected city of myth . . . McFadden has a wonderful ear for dialogue, and her entertaining prose equally accommodates humor and pathos."—New York Times Book Review
"Bernice L. McFadden's novel Glorious, which starts with a bang-up prologue, has a strong main character (based in part on Zora Neale Hurston), hard-driving prose, and historic sweep of several decades, including the years of the Harlem Renaissance, which has always fascinated me."—Jane Ciabattari, National Book Critics Circle President
"The book is sweeping in scope and brings to life the tenuous existence of an African-American artist in the early 20th century."—Vogue (Italian edition)
"I hadn't read a word of hers before [Glorious], but I will follow her from now on."—Alan Cheuse, NPR
"The novel is so intense and sweeping at the same time. Some of
the scenes were terrifying, and some were very comic in the irony of what the narrator was experiencing and what she was actually thinking. The word for a journey like this is picaresque, but the ever-impending tragedy makes that word not quite right for this book."—Susan Straight, author of A Million Nightingales
"A wonderful, rich read full of passion, history, wonder, and women you will recognize: Glorious is just that."—Jill Nelson, author of Volunteer Slavery and Let's Get It On
"The seeming inevitability of cruel fate juxtaposes the triumph of the spirit in this remarkably rich and powerful novel. Bernice McFadden's fully realized characters are complicated, imperfect beings, but if ever a character were worthy of love and honor, it is her Easter Bartlett. This very American story is fascinating; it is also heartbreaking, thought-provoking, and beautifully written."—Binnie Kirshenbaum, author of The Scenic Route
Glorious is set against the backdrops of the Jim Crow South, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Civil Rights era. Blending fact and fiction, Glorious is the story of Easter Venetta Bartlett, a fictional Harlem Renaissance writer whose tumultuous path to success, ruin, and ultimately revival offers a candid and true portrait of the American experience in all its beauty and cruelty.
It is a novel informed by the question that is the title of Langston Hughes's famous poem: What happens to a dream deferred? Based on years of research, this heart-wrenching fictional account is given added resonance by factual events coupled with real and imagined larger-than-life characters. Glorious is an audacious exploration into the nature of self-hatred, love, possession, ego, betrayal, and, finally, redemption.
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The Warmest December is available in paperback and e-book editions. Our print books are available from our website and in online and brick & mortar bookstores everywhere. The digital edition is available wherever e-books are sold.
The long-awaited reissue of McFadden's best-selling second novel praised by Toni Morrison, USA Today, the Washington Post, and others—published simultaneously with McFadden's new novel Gathering of Waters.
"McFadden's reissued second novel takes an unflinching look at the corrosive nature of alcoholism . . . This is not a story of easy redemption . . . McFadden writes candidly about the treacherous hold of addiction."—Publishers Weekly
"Riveting . . . so nicely avoids the sentimentality that swirls around the subject matter. I am as impressed by its structural strength as by the searing and expertly imagined scenes."—Toni Morrison, author of Beloved
"The sharpness of the prose and power of the story make it hard to stop reading even the most brutal scenes . . . The story feels real perhaps because it's familiar . . . Or maybe, as Frey points out, the story is too vivid to be read purely as fiction. But in this Precious-style novel, genre is the least of our concerns."—Bust magazine
"[A] masterpiece . . . full of heart and emotion . . . I hope you love the book as much as I did, and I hope it moves you as much as it did me, changes you as it did me."—James Frey, author of A Million Little Pieces, from the Introduction
"Riveting."—Essence
"Ms. McFadden is one of those rare talents who can keep a reader enthralled regardless of the topic . . . This is a story that cuts across all race and social strata in its need to be told."—Dallas Morning News
"The Warmest December is written with a searing and vivid quality that makes it impossible to stop reading."—Cleveland Plain Dealer
FOR KENZIE, GROWING UP IN THE LOWE HOUSEHOLD means opening the bottom drawer of her father's dresser to choose which belt she'll be whipped with that night, furtive trips to the Bee Hive liquor store for her father's vodka, and dreaming of the day she can escape apartment 5A.
BUOYED BY THE LYRICAL, REDEMPTIVE VOICE that characterizes McFadden's writing, The Warmest December tells the powerful, deeply moving story of one Brooklyn family and the alcoholism and abuse that marked the years of their lives. Narrated by Kenzie Lowe, a young woman reminiscent of Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John, the story moves fluidly between the past and the present as she visits her dying father and finds that choices she once thought beyond her control are very much hers to make. The Warmest December is ultimately a cathartic tale of hope, healing, and forgiveness.
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Nowhere is a Place is available in paperback and e-book editions. Our print books are available from our website and in online and brick & mortar bookstores everywhere. The digital edition is available wherever e-books are sold.
The long-awaited reissue of McFadden's classic novel about a young woman on a journey of self-discovery.
"An engrossing multigenerational saga . . . With her deep engagement in the material and her brisk but lyrical prose, McFadden creates a poignant epic of resiliency, bringing Sherry to a well-earned awareness of her place atop the shoulders of her ancestors, those who survived so that she might one day, too." —Publishers Weekly
"Telling her story from two perspectives and on two levels—the mother-daughter relationship and Sherry’s fictional account—McFadden brings added texture to this story of reconciliation."—Booklist
"Nowhere Is a Place is a powerful portrait of family secrets, damage, and healing, probing deep below the surface of an African American family’s history to mend present day relationships . . . Ms. McFadden has a beautiful writing style that is simultaneously lyrical and transparent. In parts of the narrative, time seems to stand still as she describes an event in riveting minute to minute detail. Other times she employs a kind of poetic shorthand that condenses long periods of time, years even, into a few sentences."—New York Journal of Books
"With a good dose of poignancy about life and finding the wisdom of the world for ourselves, Nowhere Is a Place is a fine addition to modern literary fiction collections." —The Midwest Book Review
Nothing can mend a broken heart quite like family. Sherry has struggled all her life to understand who she is, where she comes from, and, most important, why her mother slapped her cheek one summer afternoon. The incident has haunted Sherry, and it causes her to dig into her family’s past. Like many family histories, it is fractured and stubbornly reluctant to reveal its secrets; but Sherry is determined to know the full story. In just a few days time, her extended family will gather for a reunion, and Sherry sets off across the country with her mother, Dumpling, to join them. What Sherry and Dumpling find on their trip is far more important than scenic sites here and there—it is the assorted pieces of their family’s past. Pulled together, they reveal a history of amazing survival and abundant joy.
BERNICE L. McFADDEN is the author of nine critically acclaimed novels including Sugar, Loving Donovan, Nowhere Is a Place, The Warmest December, Gathering of Waters (a New York Times Editors’ Choice and one of the 100 Notable Books of 2012), and Glorious, which was featured in O, The Oprah Magazine and was a finalist for the NAACP Image Award. She is a three-time Hurston/Wright Legacy Award finalist, as well as the recipient of three awards from the BCALA. McFadden lives in Brooklyn, New York.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written consent of the publisher.
Published by Akashic Books
©2003, 2015 by Bernice L. McFadden
Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1-61775-318-3
eISBN-13: 978-1-61775-328-2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014938696
First printing
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Loving Donovan Page 21
