Description de l’éditeur
In the mid-1800s, Saint, an enigmatic and powerful conjure woman, always flanked by a silent companion, travels the South annihilating plantations and liberating the enslaved by means of purposeful violence and powerful magic. She founds a town for those she has freed - and for them alone. They name the town Ours. Surrounded by an impenetrable magical border raised by Saint's powers, Ours is invisible to the outer world and sits blissfully away from prying eyes and violent hands. Saint's mission is to kill slavery - to scourge its damage from the minds of her charges and to keep them safe forever.
Under Saint's watchful eye and away from the terrible weight of their enslavement, the townsfolk become neighbours, friends and lovers. They build each other's homes and care for each other's children. They love and grieve together. Then two mysterious strangers, Frances and Joy, appear, inexplicably crossing the invisible border from the outer world. Saint and Frances are connected by arcane and indivisible threads, and soon Saint's lost past and fateful present begin to coalesce in ways that will either prove Ours' salvation or lay it bare to a world that would destroy it.
Phillip B. Williams' astonishing debut novel is both a sweeping epic shot through with magic, and an intimate, elemental story about what it means to build a community and to try to build a life in the shadow of, and around the damage wrought by, slavery.
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The ambitious and lyrical debut novel from poet Williams (Mutiny) portrays a Missouri town populated by formerly enslaved people who've escaped their bonds with help from a conjurer. The epic begins in 1834, north of St. Louis, when a free Black woman named Saint manages to purchase a plot of land in Graysville, a community planned for white people, by offering $1,500 against an asking price of $200. After the sale is completed, the white residents flee, and Saint renames the town Ours. She then frees all the enslaved people at six plantations by casting a spell on the white owners that renders them fatally ill. The town continues to grow and remains unmolested because Saint's spells, which she was never properly trained to use, have inadvertently caused a "white plague" that causes the deaths of all local white people who believe Black folks are inferior. By the late 1840s, Saint's prohibition on leaving the town causes residents to question whether they're truly free, and she faces scrutiny for her imperfect conjuring abilities. The story runs on a bit too long, but the prose is often lively (newly liberated children "moved in the heat, the fire yanking sweat from their bodies, their naked feet sliding on the grass"). Williams's accomplished narrative leaves readers with much to ponder.
