Let Us Descend

The lady orders a mausoleum to be built to hold her husband’s remains, and a small group of neighbors arrives for a funeral. Meanwhile, the enslaved people of the plantation continue the harvest, with everyone working together in the green fields under the heat of a brutal sun. Annis looks up to see Bastian, Esther’s brother, who is half-hidden in the trees at the edge of the cleared land. He wants Esther to run away, but she is too scared to obey. He asks Annis to go with him instead, and the two kiss. She considers the possibility of making her escape. He gives her a parcel of raccoon meat.

Aza’s spirit visits her again and asks if Annis intends to run away with Bastian. Annis is not sure that she wants the half-freedom that living in the woods on the outskirts of this plantation would offer. She would like to run north and knows that there is a network of “ferrymen” in place to assist escapees, but she does not know how to find such people and doubts that they operate this far south. Esther and Mary fall into the water while gathering wood for the cane refinery and are swept away by the current. Annis prays to the water to keep them safe and asks Aza to watch out for them. However, Aza declines, telling Annis that her “purview” is Annis and Annis alone. Later, inside the house, the female enslaver attacks Annis with a red-hot fire iron for having “stolen” raccoon meat that she believes to be hers because she assumes that it came from her land. Although Annis initially is able to fend off the blows, it has been too long since she practiced with her mother, and she is struck. She falls to the ground. 

Annis wakes up in the hole. She senses Aza above her and hears the voices of other spirits. Although they seem to encourage her to “descend,” she tells them that doing so is no kind of life and begins to try to claw her way out of the mud-soaked enclosure. She is able to loosen the grate, but there is not enough room for her body to fit through the holes around the metal door. She suddenly remembers the elephant-tusk awl in her hair and uses it to pick the lock and free herself from the hole.

She crawls from the hole just as several white men in the employ of her enslaver reach the enclosure. Seeing the grate pried loose and the hole empty, they send for all the white men on the plantation who are not already busy searching for Esther and Mary. Frantic, Annis is not sure how to proceed and receives what seems like contradictory advice from multiple spirits. She wants to follow the water, but Aza disagrees with that course of action. Annis calls on her Mama, who reminds Annis of the time she tried to escape with her daughter to the safety of the Great Dismal Swamp. Annis chooses the water and is able to successfully evade her captors by floating downriver on a raft. While in the safety of the water, she is visited by a spirit who is definitely her grandmother, Mama Aza, and Mama Aza tells her the story of her journey from Africa to the United States on a ship full of enslaved men and women. At the time, Mama Aza knew that she was carrying Sasha, Annis’s mother, and her despair was so great that she envied the dead and dying. While she was aboard the ship, a great storm formed in the Atlantic Ocean, and Mama Aza was sure that they would all die. The hold where they were kept captive filled with water, and as she choked in the foul mixture of seawater, blood, and human waste, she realized that the storm had taken her image. She also understood that she desperately wanted to live. The despair she had felt only hours prior was transformed into a fierce will to survive.

Mama Aza tells Annis that she first understood such a survival instinct from the elephants whom she and the other warrior wives hunted. Even in their final moments, the elephants’ will to live remained strong. Annis thinks of her mother and hears Sasha’s voice reminding her that she is her own weapon, and that she is strong, special, and loved. Finally, it is only the spirit Aza who remains with Annis. Aza would like her to stay in New Orleans, hide herself, and find Aza’s children, the other spirits who “call” on her. Annis perceives Aza’s need to be needed and to mother her. She tells the spirit that she would prefer to travel onward in order to find a swamp large enough to shelter her and safeguard her from future capture. Aza agrees, and the wind blows her raft onward. She and Aza travels through New Orleans and perceives spirits everywhere, guiding people and suggesting complex, often conflicting courses of action to those who call on them. They encourage plaçage women to slowly poison their serial rapists, and they also walk with people who make their way through the crowded streets. At Annis’s insistence, they travel onward. 

After leaving New Orleans, Annis reaches the edge of a vast lake. On the shore, she sees signs of a trail and a clearing. She instinctively knows that yellow fever has ravaged the area and sees that the ruins of an enslaver’s settlement have become a home for a colony of honey-producing bees. Although Aza would like her to settle elsewhere and worries that Annis will not be able to find food, Annis is firm in her resolution to make the clearing her new home. Aza leaves but says that she will return. Annis easily forages for mushrooms, wild sorrel, and other plants.

Aza returns and asks once more for Annis to leave her clearing and its small cabin, and to return to New Orleans and become her priestess. Annis again asserts her own independence and voices her desire to stay. She has discovered that she is pregnant from a sexual encounter with Esther’s brother, and she intends to raise her child in the safety of the swampy woods. Because of her mother’s lessons in hunting and foraging, she will be able to easily live off the land. She again hears her mother’s voice and that of Mama Aza. The spirit Aza grows angry and whirls away eastward, away from New Orleans, in a storm of fury. Annis remains alone in the clearing, determined to experience freedom on her own terms.