The Salt Roads

Books

In 1804, shortly before the Caribbean island of Saint Domingue is renamed Haiti, a group of women gather to bury a stillborn baby. Led by a lesbian healer and midwife named Mer, the women's lamentations inadvertently release the dead infant's "unused vitality" to draw Ezili-the Afro-Caribbean goddess of sexual desire and love-into the physical world. As Ezili explores her newfound powers, she travels across time and space to inhabit the midwife's body, as well as those of Jeanne-a mixed-race dancer and the mistress of Charles Baudelaire living in 1880s Paris-and Meritet, an enslaved Greek-Nubian prostitute in ancient Alexandria. Bound together by Ezili and "the salt road" of their sweat, blood, and tears, the three women struggle against a hostile world, unaware of the goddess's presence in their lives. Despite her magic, Mer suffers as a slave on a sugar plantation until Ezili plants the seeds of uprising in her mind. Jeanne slowly succumbs to the ravages of age and syphilis when her lover is unable to ...