Creatures of Passage

by Morowa Yejidé

Overview

With echoes of Toni Morrison's Beloved, Yejidé's novel explores a forgotten quadrant of Washington, DC, and the ghosts that haunt it.

Longlisted for the 2022 Women’s Prize for Fiction

“Yejidé’s writing captures both real news and spiritual truths with the deftness and capacious imagination of her writing foremothers: Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison and N.K. Jemisin . . . Creatures of Passage is that rare novel that dispenses ancestral wisdom and literary virtuosity in equal measure.” —Washington Post

Nephthys Kinwell is a taxi driver of sorts in Washington, DC, ferrying passengers in a 1967 Plymouth Belvedere with a ghost in the trunk. Endless rides and alcohol help her manage her grief over the death of her twin brother, Osiris, who was murdered and dumped in the Anacostia River. Unknown to Nephthys when the novel opens in 1977, her estranged great-nephew, ten-year-old Dash, is finding himself drawn to the banks of that very same river. It is there that Dash—reeling from having witnessed an act of molestation at his school, but still questioning what and who he saw—has charmed conversations with a mysterious figure he calls the “River Man.”

When Dash arrives unexpectedly at Nephthys’s door bearing a cryptic note about his unusual conversations with the River Man, Nephthys must face what frightens her most.

Morowa Yejidé’s deeply captivating novel shows us an unseen Washington filled with otherworldly landscapes, flawed super-humans, and reluctant ghosts, and brings together a community intent on saving one young boy in order to reclaim itself.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781617758768
Publisher:	Akashic Books, Ltd.
Publication date:	03/16/2021
Pages:	322
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

MOROWA YEJIDÉ, a native of Washington, DC, is the author of the critically acclaimed novels Time of the Locust, which was a 2012 finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize, long-listed for the 2015 PEN/Bingham Prize, and a 2015 NAACP Image Award nominee; and Creatures of Passage, which was short-listed for the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, long-listed for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and was a 2021 Notable Book selection by NPR and the Washington Post. She lives in the DC area with her husband and three sons.

Editorial Reviews

01/18/2021

A woman drives a haunted Plymouth through 1977 Washington, D.C., in Yejidé’s ambitious latest (after Time of the Locust). In the city’s Anacostia neighborhood, Nephthys Kinwell drinks to numb the pain of losing her twin brother, Osiris, and with the ghost of a girl in the trunk of her car, ferries people whose voices she hears through fog that accumulates in the car. Osiris was lynched and dumped in the Anacostia River and remains restless in death, while his 10-year-old grandson, Dash, is taunted by schoolmates for communing with a mysterious figure on the Anacostia banks only he can see, whom he calls the River Man. Then there’s a janitor at Dash’s Catholic school, Mercy Ratchet, who was sexually assaulted by a priest as a boy and now preys on young children. Yejidé creates a tapestry of interconnected stories of guilt, loss, love, grief, justice, and restoration as the story builds toward an intense climax involving Mercy and Dash, and one of Nephthys’s fares, known only as the “colonel’s wife,” confronts her own family tragedy. While at times the book can feel didactic, with the characters very obviously meant as metaphors for historical trauma, Yejidé’s prose is often stunning. At its best, the story’s rich texture evokes the ghost stories of Toni Morrison. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

"The novel is worthy of every Toni Morrison comparison it receives, effortlessly blending the brutalities of D.C.’s history with the mythical and supernatural. Creatures of Passage is a lyrical journey that will stick with you."

a Books We Love selection for 2021 NPR

★ 02/01/2021

In a setting resembling Washington, DC, but very much its own place, a psychic mother, a missing father, an estranged aunt, a small boy, a murdered twin, a haunted sky-blue Plymouth Belvedere, and a predatory monster all figure in a compelling story. At its heart is the extraordinary Kinwell family, anchored by Nephthys Kinwell, who ferries people around town in the Plymouth. It's the late 1970s, with poverty, drugs, racism, and sexual abuse as backdrop, and the Kinwells use their magical powers to help and serve their neighbors. They have plenty of work to do, but each works separately from the others. When the youngest member of their own family is threatened, the Kinwells find that only together can they save their boy and themselves. VERDICT Skillfully blending fantasy and stark reality while blurring the line between the metaphoric and the tangible, Yejidé (Time of the Locust) successfully tells the story in fits and starts as each major character adds a piece to the puzzle. YA and adult fiction readers alike will enjoy. Highly recommended.—Joanna Burkhardt, Univ. of Rhode Island Libs., Providence

Library Journal

★ 2020-12-26
In which late-1970s Washington, D.C., is reimagined as an enchanted land populated by changelings, phantoms, seers, waking nightmares, and at least one haunted car.

Yejidé follows up her debut, Time of the Locust (2014), with a deeper, broader, and more audacious immersion in magical realism. It is set in 1977, and the District of Columbia is here labeled "the capital" and is surrounded by the Kingdoms of Maryland and Virginia, which are in turn parts of the “united territories” presided over by a succession of elected kings. In the city’s Anacostia section, “an isle of blood and desire…where all things lived and died on the edges of time and space and meaning,” Nephthys Kinwell operates a kind of supernatural jitney service, showing up, at times unbidden, in her rickety Plymouth Belvedere to take the community’s lonely, wayward, or forsaken wherever they want to go. Even through the car’s rattling, her passengers can hear the ghost of a White woman tapping or shifting around in the trunk. But apparently everybody living in this alternate universe is accustomed to dead people hanging around the neighborhood. Among the more restless of those spirits is Osiris, Nephthys’ twin brother, pursuing revenge on the White racists who murdered him and dumped his body in the Anacostia River. He's worried about his daughter, Amber, who's visited by dreams of the near future and regularly submits her obliquely worded prophecies to the local Black newspaper. Meanwhile, Amber’s young son, Dash, is also seeing things: a “make-believe man" by the river and, worse, a not-so-make-believe act of molestation he witnessed by accident in a school utility closet; he’s sure he’s spoken to the former while he’s still not certain he saw the latter. But the molester, whose name is Mercy, is certain he saw Dash see him. Before long, both mystic visions and real-life horrors converge into a sequence of disquieting revelations from the past and alarming prospects for calamity in the future unless Nephthys and her own spiritual powers can set in motion the hard, necessary work of placating the dead and rescuing the living.

Historic detail and mythic folklore forge a scary, thrilling vision of life along America's margins.

Kirkus Reviews

"Creatures of Passage resists comparison. It’s reminiscent of Beloved as well as the Odyssey, but perhaps its most apt progenitor is the genre of epic poems performed by the djelis of West Africa . . . All these otherwise clashing elements become, in this cast, a cohesive whole, telling us that this, too, is America."

New York Times Book Review

"Yejidé’s surreal new novel has no shortage of otherworldly surprises, but it’s her this-worldly protagonist who steals the show . . . Informed by a richly woven mythology and propelled by themes of regret and revenge, Creatures of Passage has earned some apt comparisons to Toni Morrison’s Beloved."

One of the Best Books of Winter 2021 Philadelphia Inquirer

In this ethereal novel, listeners experience the rare treat of a gifted writer narrating her own mesmerizing work. Yejidé's introspective, languorous pace is well suited to the otherworldly journeys of twins Osiris and Nephthys Kinwell—he from the other side of death's door and she barely on this side of it.” —AudioFile Magazine

"A deeply layered novel of astonishing scope, suffused in the mythical, accented by the magical, but viscerally rooted in elemental human emotions. A deeply satisfying read."
—Bloom

"Comparisons will be made to Toni Morrison and they will be well-founded, but Morowa Yejidé is in a class of her own with Creatures of Passage, a mesmerizing tale about love, loss, revenge, death, and restoration that hovers close to the edge of fantasy yet is deeply grounded in history and in a reality easily recognizable in the contemporary world."
—Elizabeth Nunez, author of Even in Paradise

"Although set in our recent past, Creatures of Passage is at heart a powerful ghost story about people haunted by the shadows of time and the shadows of blood. In the pages of this novel we discover a world that is fully recognizable, as concrete and real as Toni Morrison's Ohio, but also as fantastic and mythical as Gabriel García Márquez's Macondo. That said, make no mistake: Morowa Yejidé is a masterful storyteller in her own right, able to spin and sustain an inventive tale illuminated by a singular truth, that death is 'another form of living.'"
—Jeffery Renard Allen, author of Song of the Shank

One of African Book Addict’s Most Anticipated 2021 Releases

From the Publisher

In this ethereal novel, listeners experience the rare treat of a gifted writer narrating her own mesmerizing work. Yejidé’s introspective, languorous pace is well suited to the otherworldly journeys of twins Osiris and Nephthys Kinwell—he from the other side of death’s door and she barely on this side of it. Yejidé richly characterizes the alcoholic Nephthys, who is burdened by the voices of the dead yet strives to guide her young great-nephew, whose tales of “The River Man” lead her to suspect he is seeing the ghost of Osiris. Poverty, racism, and death are intensely examined with the underlying hope of ultimate justice and renewal. N.M.C. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine

MARCH 2021 - AudioFile