In Conjure Women, a debut novel, Afia Atakora has created a vivid picture of African American life in the decades immediately before and after emancipation. Two years after the end of the American Civil War, Rue works as a midwife and healer on the plantation where she was once enslaved. The close-knit, quiet community strives to avoid having the outside world notice that the white family that owned the land and the now-ruined mansion is gone. But everything begins to change when one of the women gives birth to a pale child with strange black eyes, "like little black-eyed beans," for which he is named.
Although Rue is shocked by the sight of him, she feels bound to him, "a secret retribution for a long-ago crime, the punishment she had been dreading." In chapters looking back to the times of slavery and war, when Rue learned her healing talents from her mother, May Belle, who also dealt in curses, the network of secrets that underlies Rue's life slowly becomes known to readers. In the Reconstruction era chapters, when illness sweeps the plantation, it becomes clear those secrets may soon destroy the fragile peace that Rue has found.
The hints of supernatural retribution and the heart-wrenching depictions of love and suffering will remind readers of Toni Morrison's work. Rue's determination to protect the people who mean the most to her, including Bean, and the devastating mistakes she makes along the way will leave readers eager for more by Atakora. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library