“Everything don’t need to be voiced. Everything don’t need to grow wings, ride the air, and visit folk you don’t know with stories they got no stake it.”
“She knew some deceptions deserved the dirt.”
In the vein of The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois comes Nikesha Elise Williams’s The Seven Daughters of Dupree (Scout Press 2026) , a sweeping multigenerational, matrilineal epic. Jumping around in time, the novel travels from 1860-2024, following the matrilineal line of an enslaved woman named Sarah by her captors; her true name remains a mystery, her story before the slave pen mostly unknown, another stolen life, but for the root magic and the braids of shells and seeds that remained.
The woman bore the child of the white man who purchased her that day, a child named Emma that would be raised by Evangeline, a childless “mammy” who served as a midwife for Zephaniah Foster Dupree’s plantation. When Dupree dies, he leaves everything to Evangeline and Emma, death and guilt finding him at the same time. And so begins the Dupree line, the name of the slave-owner a mark forever a reminder.
The women are cursed by the woman Dupree called Sarah, cursed to bear only one girl child – no boys will live. Despite all the efforts to appease Spirit, she takes the boys. Emma has Jubilee, a woman who grows up and crosses the tracks, white passing until she gives birth to a child dark as the woman they called Sarah had been. Her husband kicks them both out, pretending to bury them and erasing them from the white side of town. Jubi names the baby Ruby. Ruby gives birth to Gladys, the pale skin returning to the line. Gladys gives birth to Nadia (before breaking the curse) and Nadia births Tati. It is Tati who tells the story of their line.
The emphasis on root magic, especially as related to the women’s “crowns” is beautifully done. Additionally, the use of braids as a map to freedom is depicted extremely well here, even with its horrific outcome for the woman they called Sarah.
It’s a remarkable novel, especially in how the secrets unfold and overlap and scream.
Read this book.
A Girl Named Tommi 