Of Blood and Yams

OF BLOOD AND YAMS
A Novel — Book One of the Of Blood and Yams Trilogy

In 1875, Nyami cooks yams alone by candlelight and tastes eighteen years of grief in every bite. Eighteen years earlier, she was a seven-year-old girl carrying a dying young mother's newborn son three hours down a red dirt road to a mission orphanage — the first step in a story that would span oceans, generations, and the space between the living and the dead.

Of Blood and Yams moves between the mission compounds of colonial West Africa and the cane fields of antebellum Louisiana, following two Beaumont brothers torn apart by slavery and conscience; Sarah Delacroix, who belongs fully to neither the big house nor the quarters her mother is enslaved in; a warrior woman named Adaeze, who has spent her life training her body into a weapon against the family that killed her brother; and Nyami herself, keeper of stories older than any of them — stories of celestial beings who walk among mortals, of blood poured into the earth before the harvest, of debts that outlive the people who incurred them.

As a railroad cuts through ancestral land and a war builds toward Louisiana's cane fields, these threads pull toward a single reckoning: a field where blood and yams have always been planted together, and where the dead do not stay as buried as the living need them to be.

Rooted in West African cosmological tradition and told with unflinching honesty about the cruelties of slavery and colonialism, Of Blood and Yams is ultimately a novel about inheritance — the debts we're born into, the stories we're given to carry, the gardens we choose to tend, and the yams we plant anyway.

This is Book One of a planned trilogy.