The hero of novel ‘Ours’ frees enslaved people and makes them a home

In 1834, a woman carrying a “wood staff carved to bear a nest of thirteen serpent mouths” frees slaves throughout Arkansas by leveling plantations and causing the deaths of slave owners.

She then leads the people north toward St. Louis, where she purchases an all-white town for three times what it’s worth. Before the people move into the town, which they rename Ours, the woman known as Saint shepherds them to a creek to wash away “all that wasn’t theirs to carry: their bruises, their traumas, their hardened melancholy.”

The debut novel of poet Phillip B. Williams, “Ours” is so vivid a glimpse into the lives of formerly enslaved people that it reads with the beauty and urgency of a spoken word poem. “Everything we made up of is Africa,” an 87-year-old woman says. “We all got African water coursing through us and African dirt packed up in our muscles. Even our bones full of dark, dark earth of where we come from.”

As the people settle into town and begin to feel safe from outside predators (thanks to Saint’s spells) muscles uncoil. Breathing comes easier. Grief, love, fear, envy, loss, loneliness and hope rise to the surface. All that makes them who they are takes on mythical heft. The writing is vastly imaginative — it’s as if Toni Morrison and Ovid got together to rewrite the Greek myths through an African lens, against the backdrop of American bigotry.

The actions and emotions of the town’s residents are often archetypal. For example, after Saint leads the people to freedom, they revere her. But when she botches a conjure, they turn on her. A one-time ally burns down her house and a boy whose parents died because of the mistake comes to personify anger. Emotions wrestle with longing; longing turns to rage; rage turns to hope. And through it all runs a current of magic and myth that the characters ride into the future like a wild horse.

Some residents are ageless; some have mystical powers. An androgynous follower of Saint finds that she has the power to deflect attack. When she is shot at, the shooter dies from a gunshot wound. When she is struck with a fist, injury happens to the assailant. Similarly, twin 9-year-olds discover they possess the ability to heal, and yet their powers are warped by loveless childhoods.

This is an important novel, peopled with vivid characters literally and figuratively hidden from view. Every scene portrays a people trying to understand themselves, individuals trying to give and receive love, attempting to balance hope with trauma.

I can see why an editor might hesitate to trim any of it. But tightening in the service of narrative might have helped the nearly 600 pages rise from a collection of vignettes to a propulsive masterpiece.

Christine Brunkhorst is a Twin Cities writer and reviewer.

Ours

By: Phillip B. Williams.

Publisher: Viking, 580 pages, $32.