“Conjure Women” is a tale of slavery and its aftermath

Conjure Women. By Afia Atakora. Random House; 416 pages; $27. Fourth Estate; £14.99. 

RUE KNEW she was a liar. When she was enslaved, and then during her first years of freedom, she often said, falsely, “I know.” As a child, she only pretended to understand why her mother’s love felt so fierce and unforgiving. Years later, as her plantation’s resident healer, she was not sure why so many babies fell ill, or why women felt certain pains in childbirth, but she assured people otherwise. Rue saw that healing demanded faith and that she had to seem confident to get others to believe in her power. Her magic “ought to be absolute…or it wasn’t magic at all”.

“Conjure Women”, Afia Atakora’s atmospheric debut novel, is largely Rue’s story. Born into slavery in America’s South, she tends to the plantation’s pregnant and sick in the years after the civil war. Her mother, May Belle, made her name and living crafting curses for fellow slaves. “Hoodoo”, May Belle would say, “is black folks’ currency.” From her, Rue learned to heal, but she is wary of witchcraft—and troubled by a shameful secret. When an illness claims the lives of local children, grieving parents accuse her of devilry. Meanwhile, Bruh Abel, a handsome itinerant minister with “a too-wide grin on his face”, arrives peddling...