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He set down his coil and stood, moving to a cabinet inside the door. He came back with a finished basket—intricate, tight-coiled, smelling of something coppery underneath. He put the warm basket in my hands. It pulsed, faintly, like something with a heartbeat.

"She takes men because she's lonely," he said. "Because she's carrying the memory of every woman who died in the holds—the mothers, the sisters, the wives who went overboard rather than be chained. She took their shape, their hunger, their longing for home. She makes men night husbands. Keeps them close. She feeds on them, yes, but she also gives something back. Dreams of Ghana. Dreams of a place none of us can go back to and none of us can forget."

"She has my cousin,” I said, tight-lipped.

"And she'll have you too, you go out there with that knife." He sat back down, heavily. "But there's something else you need to understand, London boy, before you go deciding who the monster is: learn the Adze’s true history here on our land. There’s also that white devil, Vance."

"I've heard the name," I confirmed, skipping over the rest of what he’d just said.

"He's been here. Stood right where you're sitting. Offered me two thousand dollars to tell him where she sleeps." Seabrook's jaw twitched. "He's got a rifle with silver bullets, a cross made of iron, a case of holy water blessed by some priest in Richmond who's never seen the inside of a slave ship. He thinks he's hunting a demon and doing God's work."

"And he isn't?"

Seabrook laughed, short and bitter. "Let me tell you what she is since nobody told you right. She don't feed on white men—can’t. Their blood is poison to her—the blood of captors, of overseers, of the men who sailed the ships and swung the whips. She tried, once, on the crossing. It burned her and sickened her. Devilish blood, she calls it. So when they come for her—when they come for us—she don't drink—she kills with teeth and hands. She rips out their throats and leaves them for the gators."

The warm basket sat heavy in my lap as I waited for him to continue. He was a wealth of knowledge and a bridge between outsiders and the Gullah people.

"1876," he said. "Red Shirts rode onto Wadmalaw to burn out a Black family that'd bought their own land—eleven men on horses. Nine of them didn't ride home. 1923, Klan came for a preacher on Johns Island. They found three of the Klansmen in the marsh the next morning with their throats opened like letters. 1961, Freedom Riders stopped in Charleston, and a man who'd planned to meet their bus with a shotgun was found in his own truck, drained of nothing, just dead and opened." Seabrook's voice was steady. "She has protected us for centuries, Malik. Every slave catcher and overseer with a hard-on for the quarters. Every pale son of a bitch who thought he could come down here and take what wasn't his. She is our hungry ghost and our spirit of resistance. Vance is just the latest in a long, long line of devils to be killed."

The afternoon had gone amber around us. Somewhere a mockingbird was running through its repertoire as I asked, "Why are you telling me this?"

"Because you got a choice coming," he said. "Whether to go through with your plans to kill her and leave us vulnerable. Whether to protect her from him and the world." He nodded at my bag. "That iron your grandmother gave you—she knew what she was doing. Iron is for monsters. You just got to know which one you're looking at."

My breath caught. "She said that. Those exact words."

"I know, she wrote to me in 1998. Akosua Owusu. Lovely handwriting." He smiled for the first time, and it transformed his face. "She said her grandson would come one day looking for the Adze, and I was to teach him to weave, and I was not under any circumstances to let him do anything stupid before he'd learned."

I sat there, holding a basket that breathed, and felt the ground shift under everything I thought I'd come here to do.

"Dawn tomorrow," Seabrook said. "Bring your hands and your patience. Leave the knife but bring your hunger, boy. Bring the thing you don't want nobody to see. She'll smell it on you anyway."

CHAPTER FOUR

THE LEARNING

Iarrived at dawn when the sky was turning pink over the marsh as the horizon bled gold and crimson—her colors. Seabrook sat on his porch with bundles of sweetgrass, longleaf pine needles, and strips of palmetto laid out like surgical instruments and offerings.

"Sweetgrass don't grow easy," he said. "Only near the water, where salt and fresh mix. We harvest it with care, never taking more than what we need. Be sure to always say thank you because it’s sacred, you understand?" he asked.

I nodded.

"Show me your hands."

I did as I was told, and he turned them over, examining my palms—tracing the lines like he was reading something.

"These some soft university hands, but they'll do. She won't come to a man with hard hands because she likes gentleness and patience. She craves the kind of touch that knows how to wait." He gave me a bundle of grass. "You start with the coil. Everything comes from the coil. Grass, bound with the pine needle, stitched with the palmetto. It goes round and round, no beginning and no ending. It’s like life and the tide. It reminds you of the love of a spirit that don't die but don't quite live either."

His hands moved over the grass like he was playing an instrument. It obeyed him, curling into a tight spiral, growing outward in rings like a stone dropped in still water. I tried to copy him, but my coil was loose and ugly. The grass was sharper than I expected, causing thin cuts to bloom across my palms.

"Blood," Seabrook said, pleased. "Good. The grass remembers blood. You bleeding on it means you're giving something. That's what she wants. Not just your blood, but your effort and surrender."

We continued to work in silence as the sun climbed. Sweat soaked my shirt as my fingers went from sore to numb to sore again. Close to giving up, slowly—torturously so—the coil began to tighten and look like something.

"Why weaving?" I asked near noon. "Why does she care?" I found the courage to ask.

He didn't answer right away. "Because she's a weaver. She weaves souls. Weaves the living and the dead. Africa that was and America that is. When you learn to weave, you learn her language. You learn how to be woven yourself." He looked at me. "You want to understand what happened to your cousin? Make a basket tight enough to hold water. Then she'll come."

I came back the next day and the next until I had spent seven dawns on that porch, bleeding on grass, making something out of nothing. On the fourth day I drove to the Charleston City Market in the afternoon, because Seabrook had told me to watch the women there weave and keep my mouth shut. That's where I saw him.