Things Past Tellingis a remarkable historical epic that charts one unforgettable womans journey across an ocean of years as vast as the Atlantic that will forever separate her from her homeland.

Born in West Africa in the mid-eighteenth century, Maryam Prescilla Gracea.k.a Momma Grace will live a long, wondrous life marked by hardship, oppression, opportunity, and love. Though she will be gifted various names, her birth name is known to her alone. Over the course of 100-plus years, she survives capture, enslavement by several property owners, the Atlantic crossing when she is only eleven years of age, and a brief stint as a pirates ward, acting as both a spy and a translator.

Maryam learns midwifery from a Caribbean-born wise woman, whose craft combines curated techniques and medicines from African, Indigenous, and European women. Those midwifery skills allow her to sometimes transcend the racial and class barriers of her enslavement, as she walks the razors edge trying to balance the lives and health of her own people with the cruel economic mandates of the slave holders, who view infants born in bondage not as flesh-and-blood children but as investment property.

Throughout her triumphant and tumultuous life Maryam gains and loses her homeland, her family, her culture, her husband, her lovers, and her children. Yet as the decades pass, this tenacious woman never loses her sense of self.

Inspired by a 112-year-old woman the author discovered in an 1870 U.S. Federal census report for Ohio, loosely based on the authors real-life female ancestors, spanning more than a hundred years, from the mid-eighteen-century to the end of Americas Civil War, and spanning across the globe, from what is now southern Nigeria to the islands of the Caribbean to North America and the land bordering the Ohio River,Things Past Tellingis a breathtaking story of a past that lives on in all of us, and a life that encompasses the bestand worstof our humanity.

Published : February 21, 2023

Language : English

Paperback : 352 pages