Annie Jo: A Novel

At eighty-two, her mother answered to four names. The daughter had been listening to all of them.Apostle Annie Jo Halloway is eighty-two. She has founded three houses of ministry across forty years in Natchez, Mississippi. She has ordained six women, buried two sisters, and kept the same small gold thing on the shelf above her chair through every house she has ever lived in.For thirty-six years, her daughter Evie has been her mother's daughter — watching from the back pew of every revival, kneeling at the kitchen morning when the call was passed down. The notebooks Evie has been filling since November are not the book she thought she was writing. They are the book she has been writing for thirty-six years — since the morning her mother said what you have been watching is yours.Behind the door of the small Linton Avenue house, Annie Jo sits in the same chair where she has sat for thirty years. The hymnbook is open. The skillet is on the back burner. The small gold thing throws its piece of the late afternoon onto the wall where her mother does not see it. The daughter sees it. The daughter has begun, in this season, to write down what was hers all along.Some women carry a thing across the whole length of their lives.Some daughters finally agree to write it down. Read more