The Salt Roads

When three Caribbean slave women gather one night to bury a stillborn baby, their collective mournings are braided into a powerful calling, and a deity is born. So begins the epic journey of Ezili, the Afro-Caribbean goddess of love and sex who, in a bid to discover her own nature, defies the limitations of time and place to inhabit the minds of living women throughout history. Jeanne Duval, the deeply sensual black woman with whom nineteenth-century bohemian poet Charles Baudelaire has a passionate but ultimately dysfunctional affair; Meritet, the Nubian prostitute on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 300 A.D. who walks away from the desert into history as St. Mary of Egypt; Mer, a slave struggling to survive under the tyranny of her brutal masters on the island of Saint Domingue, soon to be renamed Haiti.