"We Will Be Storm" by Jesmyn Ward, Spirits and Chains

Annis—her real, secret name is Arese: "the one who comes at the right time" —is a young girl who listens at doors. Her mother is worried. The master might get angry. This merciless man is the father of Annis, conceived during a rape. We are in Carolina, probably in the 19th century, and Annis, her mother Sasha, and all the other black people, servants or farm workers, are listed—like the animals, the tools, the furniture—on the list of possessions of this white landowner who lives in a "crowned, cream-colored house." Not far away are the rice paddies, big eaters of free and hungry labor, and then the forest.

What does Annis listen to when her exhausting domestic work gives her a little respite? She strains her ears to catch what the tutor of her two half-sisters, pink children born on the right side, is saying in the classroom. Their tutor tells them about Aristotle and the bees, and also: he "tells the story of a man, an Italian of old, who descends into hell. The hell he goes through has floors like my master's house. The tutor says: 'It is with these words "And now, let us descend into this dark world," that the poet begins,' and these words resonate within me. I hear the sighs: the summer wind pushing the house, the groaning of the wood, but instead of the Italian poet, I see my mother toiling in the hell that is this house."

The beginning of the book is still relatively soft