Soraya Palmer

“Mothers never die. Children love to resurrect us in they stories.” Folktales and spirits animate this lively and unforgettable coming-of-age tale of two Jamaican-Trinidadian sisters in Brooklyn grappling with their mother’s illness, their father's infidelity, and the truth of their family's past Sisters Zora and Sasha Porter are drifting apart. Bearing witness to their father’s violence and their mother’s worsening illness, an unsettled Zora escapes into her journal, dreaming of being a writer, while Sasha discovers sex and chest binding, spending more time with her new girlfriend than at home. But the sisters, like their parents, must come together to answer to something more ancient and powerful than they know—and reckon with a family secret buried in the past. A tale told from the perspective of a mischievous narrator, featuring the Rolling Calf who haunts butchers, Mama Dglo who lives in the ocean, a vain tiger, and an outsmarted snake, The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential Ghosts is set in a world as alive and unpredictable as Helen Oyeyemi’s. Telling of the love between sisters who don’t always see eye to eye, this extraordinary debut novel is a celebration of the power of stories, asking, What happens to us when our stories are erased? Do we disappear? Or do we come back haunting?

A Novel

The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential Ghosts

Ellie 

Sometimes I wonder if the difference between God and the Devil is that with one we sacrifice our bodies and with the other we sacrifice our freedom. I just wish I could remember which was which.

I love you, Daddy, but I'm afraid your words will pound me till I'm dead.

Didn't anybody ever tell him not to push against the Wind? She's unpredictable. Hurricanes and tornadoes come out of nowhere they say and it's true. She'd never admit it to anyone, but underneath all that bravado, all she really wants is a little recognition for the world to know that even the Wind gets a little lonely sometimes. It's no wonder she feels the need to be everywhere at once.

If you look carefully through these pages, you will find absolutely no traces of blood. After all, they say the most horrific moments of our history get told to us as footnotes. Things that if you aren't looking, you would never see: the people who were swept up and made to keep quiet; the sizable chunks of my popped lung that are decorating the left-hand corner of this book.

You see, the funny thing about stories is that we want them to end with a sprint into the sunset, an evil stepmother getting what's coming to her, a true love that never fades, a mother who comes back from the dead. But also, we don't want stories to end. Especially when they're our stories. After we die, we want to live forever in the moment we love the most. We want the moment to be replayed over and over again until our record player breaks, but it can't break because this is forever. And we don't want to be aware that we are living in forever because it's the thinking about forever that makes us all want to die in the first place.

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