The River Where Blood Is Born (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

Stitched together like a quilt or a piece of Kente cloth, this novel recasts the black experience as myth, encompassing both the world of the spirits and the world of ordinary human endeavors. It opens with the story of how Ananse the spider entered the villages of women ancestor spirits and learned the stories of Africa's daughters. The tale that drives the novel is of two women who are made to leave their village with their children. Ama, the daughter of one of the women, bears a child with the son of the other, and is then sold into slavery. The novel--told in diaries and journals, letters, and more conventional narrative forms--follows Ama's descendants in their wanderings throughout the New World and finally back to Africa.