Excerpt from Make Your Way Home by Carrie R. Moore, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

When We Go, We Go Downstream

In the restaurant's fading light, he tells the story to his woman. Warily, the way his father told it to him:

There once lived a man named Elijah. A man who, among many other things—blacksmith, singer, lover of russet pears—had been born a slave. In those days, Texas had yet again changed its mind about what it was. It had belonged to Mexico, then became its own fearsome land, then joined Polk's America, then splintered off with the rest of the rebellious South. Texas dreamed of cotton and the hands to pick it. Elijah dreamed of Evaline, whom his master forbade him to call wife.

On that plantation by the Brazos River, they met by night, Elijah approaching the women's cabin and unfolding the back of his throat to announce his arrival. Evaline heard the low, guttural trill of a nightjar and came out to meet him. They must've talked in that starry darkness. Perhaps she confessed that on the nights he did not come, she heard hundreds of such birds in the woods and believed him everywhere at once. Perhaps he told her about the extra minutes he spent playing with the horses instead of forging their shoes. Small victories against the master who was also his father. The man owned him in neither manner. Still, it was hard to give love in such a place. For twenty years, Elijah had seen his master-father keep his mother in a cabin apart from the other slaves, bringing her shawls in winter and apple dumplings in summer. Then, either tired of her or goaded by the plantation mistress, Master Roberts sold her to a trader heading to Arkansas. In watching her vanish against the horizon, Elijah learned how hard it was to keep anything in this life.

After, Evaline held him close, enveloping him against the trunk of a wax myrtle. In his mind, he held his mother's scent. She'd smelled of butter, which she'd used to keep her hands smooth.

One night, Elijah did not go to Evaline's cabin, instead seeking his freedom under a half-moon. He waded through the river's shallows, not only so the dogs couldn't track his scent but also to let the water shake loose what memories he had of his fine-boned father. Those lingering cabin visits. The whispers of making his slave-son a driver over the others. None of it had offered protection. Elijah had only the certainty of his feet taking him away, toward a self he could claim.

Evaline hadn't expected his leaving without her. He couldn't have been the first man she'd lost. But he was the first to leave by choice. His name rose again and again in the whispers of other slaves, a taunt.

So she visited a witch who lived in a grove of bald cypresses, making her way there on a night when no birds sang. She brought with her Elijah's shirt, cream colored and made of homespun linen, thick with his smell and therefore his memory. The witch tied three knots in it.

Now this would be true: Any lovers Elijah had would grow to despise him, would find in him faults that he did not possess. They would leave him, his name rotting in their mouths. And if he had sons and daughters, the same would be true for them.

Though, a witch was a witch and could give no gift without a blade. Because as Evaline made her way back to the cabin, she didn't yet know she carried Elijah's child. That babe was born the year before freedom, then grew older and sharecropped that same plantation—up until his wife accused him of hoarding what little they had, then left him for a farmer with his own land in West Texas.

And when that sharecropper's youngest son grew up and moved to Austin to work as a porter, his wife said she couldn't abide a man who lived in the bottom of a bottle—though he drank only on Friday nights, the law being what it was.

And neither that porter's sons nor daughters nor grandchildren could keep anyone around for long. Always, their lovers ran off with their paychecks or mailed divorce papers without warning or decided, out of nowhere, that dating a Roberts made them want to live somewhere more mountainous and cold.

Excerpted from Make Your Way Home by Carrie R. Moore. Reprinted with permission from Tin House/Zando. Copyright © 2025 by Carrie R. Moore